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Bring on the burning stoves and the hot-air blast of a roaring oven. Autumn’s new cookbooks are an inspiriting combination of history, practicality, design and, of course, endless attractive recipes.

‘Boucherie’ by Chase Cormier

One-time butcher, now a scholar, Chase Cormier is an ideal documentarian of the indispensable south Louisiana culinary tradition known as boucherie. The term, deep in the rural stretches of the Pelican State, can signify the art of butchering; it can also denote the raucous gatherings in which a pig — or pigs — is slaughtered and its parts processed and preserved for future sustenance.

Cormier is “not sentimental,” said Kitchen Arts & Letters in an email review. Instead, he tells the story of how meat processing has changed over the centuries and how the idea of Cajun food has been “shaped, sold and reinvented.” Personal and regarded from a keen bird’s-eye view, “Boucherie” is a pocket-sized book that has a grand vision. (out now, $23, LSU Press, Amazon)

‘Cookbooking: A Fan’s Guide’ by Debbie Berne

Beauty is not strictly in a successful recipe but also in how the best cookbooks are presented. “Cookbooking,” by designer Debbie Berne who designed innumerable cookbooks and died last December, is a “savory tribute to cookbooks as aesthetic objects,” said Publisher’s Weekly.

The book’s range is astonishing. It touches on iconic tomes like “The Joy of Cooking,” dissects homespun community cookbooks often assembled by-hand and draws the thread from TV show-themed cookbooks to the current wash of food — and very much not-food — celebrity cookbooks. “Cookbooking” presents the finished product with a “lighthearted tone and loose structure,” a “colorful celebration” of a cookbook factor that the genre’s lovers sometimes take for granted. (out now, $30, Hardie Grant, Amazon)

‘Happy Snacking, Don’t Die!: Foraging and Vegan Recipes with Black Forager’ by Alexis Nikole Nelson with Jeanelle Hayner Olson

If you know the Black Forager on social media, you love her — or you should. Alexis Nikole Nelson, the freewheeling, insanely knowledgeable person beyond the handle, debuts her first cookbook, “Happy Snacking Don’t Die,” and as the title intimates, the book is a bounty of charming encouragement and cheeky asides. The “joy Nelson injects into the book makes foraging approachable,” said Emily Conover at ScienceNews.

You will learn that the fruits of the linden tree are akin to an earthier chocolate and that “practicality, safety and play” can coexist, said Bettina Makalintal at Eater. All this while you fumble your way into better trying understand and, yes, consume the plant world gloriously sprouting everywhere around you. (out now, $35, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

‘Kincentricity: Connecting to Nature with American Indian Food Traditions’ by Enrique Salmón

Enrique Salmón, a Rarámuri (Tarahumara) scholar and professor in the San Francisco Bay Area, trumpets his book’s central tenet, “kincentricity,” as an “Indigenous worldview emphasizing the interconnectedness of all living beings and our responsibility to be good stewards of the planet we share,” said Jamie Feldmar at Saveur.

The book’s introduction, subtitled “Sharing Breath with Our Relatives,” takes the reader on a wander through the kincentricity’s complementary notion, iwigara, the “total interconnectedness and integration of all life in the Sierra Madre [Mountains], physical and spiritual.” You acquire, through Salmón’s clear sense of place, an ethnography of the people tied to this land and then glean, in the ensuing chapters on native foodstuffs like huckleberries, mesquite and stinging nettles, that no matter where you live, plucking the thread that links all life is a right and proper way to exist on this planet. (out now, $35, Rizzoli, Amazon)

‘No. 1 Best Indian Cookbook in the World’ by Meherwan Irani with Jamie Feldmar

Meherwan Irani, owner of a few Chai Pani restaurants in the southern United States along with the spice company Spicewalla, is one of a number of Indian American chefs who have noted the strong parallels between the cooking of the Indian subcontinent and that of the South. In Irani’s debut cookbook, “No. 1 Best Indian Cookbook in the World,” he drives the point home, with a “healthy mix of expected recipes and those likely new to most Americans, allowing readers to explore a wider variety of Indian cuisine,” said Aaron Pahl at Library Journal.

Collards, black-eyed peas and chiles are a few of the through lines between the cuisines. Irani sometimes rams them together in innovative ways. His Sloppy Jai is his adaptation of keema, a spiced ground meat dish, served like a Sloppy Joe as a thrilling, messy sandwich. Proof that “Indian cuisine is not only approachable, but that it’s not that different from what you’re already cooking and eating,” said Alana Al-Hatlani at Southern Living. (out now, $40, Ten Speed Press, Amazon)

‘Gather Around My Table: Simple, Flavorful Recipes from My Global Pantry’ by Kay Chun

Imagine, if you will, those translucent shrimp dumplings, har gow, you snag as a dim sum cart wheels past you. These, though, are dressed with butter and parmesan, like the liveliest comfort pasta you have ever eaten. Welcome to Kay Chun’s recipe-creating world, where you can use her book “Gather Around My Table” as your guide.

There is an effortlessness and an inevitability to how Chun creates dishes. She employs “low-lift but flavor-packed flourishes,” said Makalintal at Eater, to recipes like chicories in a caper-raisin vinaigrette and sticky date snacking cake with the addition of prunes for a double wallop of dried-fruit vigor. All the things you ever wanted to eat, in Chun’s capable hands, were there all along. (Oct. 6, $40, Knopf, Amazon)

‘Daily Dessert: Treats on Repeat’ by Caroline Schiff

Dessert-making need not always be like climbing Kilimanjaro. Sometimes it can be a stroll across a hillock, and celebrated New York City pastry chef Caroline Schiff has written a “book about making baking less annoying and more chill, a boon for anyone who would love baked goods more often but hates the thought of all the fuss,” said Makalintal at Eater.

One steady aspect of frippery-free baking is desserts that keep. Expect clementine snacking cake, granola treated with the flavors of halvah, malted milk chocolate truffles and rosemary-hazelnut shortbreads. A sweet treat should be both for now and later because, as Schiff wrote in the book’s introduction, “around the globe, dessert is, well, just that — daily. Many countries and cultures have joyfully and intentionally built the practice into their everyday lives,” Now it’s your turn. (Oct. 13, $35, Abrams, Amazon)

‘East to East: Recipes and Stories from Mumbai to New York’ by Rachel Gurjar

Forever toggling between the tastes of Mumbai and New York, the recipes of Gurjar, a former editor at Bon Appétit, are like skyscrapers: big-flavored with dependable foundations.

Burrata, served with pistachios and tamarind-glazed roasted grapes, yelps why it will forever be craveable. A chicken Caesar salad receives a deep plane facelift by treating the bird kebab-style. Yes, those are the invigorating spices of chai in that espresso martini and that taco bowl is loaded not with seasoning packet-laced ground beef but spunky lamb keema. The familiar has never been quite so promisingly electroshocked. (Oct. 13, $35, Chronicle Books, Amazon)

What happened

Macklemore on Thursday announced a Free Palestine concert tour, less than two weeks after the rapper was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour for making pro-Palestinian comments onstage and accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. All proceeds from the new tour will benefit Palestinian aid organizations, Macklemore and Live Nation said.

Who said what

After Macklemore was kicked off Sheeran’s tour, all the other supporting artists quit. The controversy “thrust the Israel-Hamas war into the pop music world,” The New York Times said. There’s been a “collective awakening around Palestinian liberation,” Macklemore said in a social media post announcing his tour. “When the billionaire class can decide which voices are allowed on stage and which ones are too dangerous to hear, everyone should be paying attention.”

At the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the allegation of Israeli genocide the “biggest lie of the century.” When “scores of delegates trooped out of the hall in protest” of his speech, The Associated Press said, Netanyahu called them “moral cowards.”

What next?

The Free Palestine Tour is scheduled to begin with three dates next month in Dublin, Paris and London. Announcements about the other artists on the tour, “as well as U.S. dates, are forthcoming,” said the AP.

The arrival in the UK of the Bayeux Tapestry has caught the headlines in recent weeks, and for good reason. But London, and the rest of the country, has a wealth of high-quality exhibitions taking place over the coming months, which also demand attention.

The capital, Bath, Liverpool and Newcastle are all hosting some highly anticipated shows, ranging from studies of Korean culture, portraits of the 90s and the birth of oil painting among others. Here are some of our favourites.

Korea

British Museum, London WC1

If you can’t get tickets for the Bayeux Tapestry exhibit, the British Museum has much more in store. Its next big show is dedicated to Korea, and encompasses the past two millennia of that nation’s culture and history. Featuring paintings, sculptures and decorative pieces, as well as religious icons, it will recount the peninsula’s complex history in eye-catching detail. Many of the pieces have been borrowed from collections in Korea itself, and have never before been seen in the UK.
1 October-31 January 2027; britishmuseum.org

Ancient Landscape, Modern Times: Eric Ravilious and the Artists of the Chalk Downs

Holburne Museum, Bath

In the years between the world wars, a number of British painters adopted a style that embraced the new while also expressing a yearning for Britain’s mysterious past. Chief among them was Eric Ravilious (1903-1942), whose pictures present an uncanny synthesis of ancient and modern. At Bath’s Holburne Museum, his paintings of the South Downs will be shown with works by contemporaries such as William Nicholson, Paul Nash and Tirzah Garwood. For these artists, the view from the hills wasn’t just a picturesque vision; it was a means to explore questions of English identity and belonging.
3 October-10 January 2027; holburne.org

The 90s: Art and Fashion

Tate Britain, London

Curated by Edward Enninful, the former editor of Vogue, this celebration of a decade known for its bold creativity will feature art by the likes of Steve McQueen, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, photographs by Juergen Teller and David Sims, and fashion collections by Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen.
8 October-14 February 2027; tate.org.uk

Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry

Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

The Laing Gallery’s autumn exhibition joins the dots between the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite “Brotherhood” and their literary fellow-travellers. Featuring major loans from collections across the UK, including works by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Edward Burne-Jones, it shows how the movement’s leading lights were inspired by poets such as Dante, Chaucer and Keats, as well as by their own contemporaries – and how the artists influenced later poets.
17 October-13 February 2027; northeastmuseums.org.uk/laing

Van Eyck: The Portraits

National Gallery, London WC2

Jan van Eyck has been described as the inventor of oil painting; and while this has since been disputed, there’s no doubting his status as a founding artist of the Western canon. Only around 20 paintings by van Eyck (1390-1441) are known to have survived, including nine portraits: of rich Flanders merchants, nobles – not least the deathless “Arnolfini Portrait” (1434) – and family members. For the first time, all nine will be united. Along with its forthcoming Renoir show, this National Gallery exhibition is sure to be a highlight of the coming months.
21 November-11 April 2027; nationalgallery.org.uk

Mary Magdalene: Woman and Myth

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

The Walker’s next big show invites us to consider one of history’s most contentious yet frequently portrayed figures: Mary Magdalene. This exhibition tells her extraordinary story through early Renaissance panels by Carlo Crivelli, Annibale Carracci and Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, and reinterprets it through baroque paintings and even works of conceptual art. The show will also tour to Sheffield and Bishop Auckland.
6 February 2027-23 May 2027; liverpoolmuseums.org.uk

Kia’s five-seater electric minibus is “practical, spacious and fun”, said The Telegraph, and about half the price of the cheapest version of the popular Volkswagen ID. Buzz.

At 4,695mm by 2,255mm, the PV5 is larger than it seems, with sliding rear side doors and a huge 1,330 litres of boot space (3,615 litres with the rear seats folded). Its interior is not nearly as “stylised” as the VW’s, but it is “no less useful”.

The “superb value” PV5 comes with a choice of two batteries, said Top Gear Magazine: 51.5kWh, good for 120bhp, or the 71kWh, good for 160bhp, with “impressively efficient” ranges of 183 and 256 miles respectively.

A “refined ride”, it drives “beautifully”, with “composed cornering”, good body control and super-light steering. It takes 10.6secs to get to 62mph, or a “plodding” 12.8secs in the standard-range car, but has “ample zip off the line”.

The PV5 is the first of a family of Kia vans, with a seven-seater due to follow soon, said Car Magazine. The vast interior is “a bit drab” but has potential, with a 12.9-inch touchscreen, plus a 7-inch driver’s display, and Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

The hard plastics are robust, the seats comfy and there’s loads of space. On offer are two trims, but Plus, which adds luxuries, only comes with the bigger battery.

Five years on from their excellent co-production of “Jitney”, the Headlong theatre company and Leeds Playhouse have returned to August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle” with a “striking” revival of “Fences”, said Catherine Love in The Guardian.

Wilson’s 1950s-set play, which won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award in 1987, is a “drama of family, masculinity and thwarted ambition”, which paints “national issues of race and inequality on a domestic canvas”.

The play’s focus is the Maxson family and its patriarch Troy, a one-time baseball player who was robbed of professional success owing to the colour of his skin, and who now works as a garbage man. “Ray Fearon is horribly compelling as this tragic figure, a man made monstrous by circumstance.”

It’s a tough play, in which “brutality and injustice” are “shot through with fleeting moments of possibility” – but director Daniel Bailey’s staging deftly blends “gritty realism” with “playful theatricality”.

Wilson is not known for his subtlety, said Matt Barton in The Stage. “Where most playwrights might allow themselves one big, blustery speech, that’s effectively [his] default mode.” Yet in this terrifically performed production, the speechifying lands as “muscular, rather than cumbrous” – and the set-piece confrontations are “phenomenally powerful”.

With slow-building intensity, the play eventually attains the “heart-aching weight of an Arthur Miller tragedy”, said Holly Williams in The Times. And Fearon’s “superb” performance is matched by those of Madeline Appiah as Troy’s wife Rose, and Michael Ahomka-Lindsay and Josh Tedeku as their two sons.

Appiah’s understated turn does much to leaven the play’s prolixity and heaviness, said Jim Keaveney on WhatsOnStage. Simon-Anthony Rhoden is also excellent as Troy’s brother Gabriel, who suffered a brain injury during wartime service that has “left him in childlike innocence. His appearances lift the play with warm humour and pathos in a role that could too easily be played for laughs.”

Oxford Playhouse until 3 October, then touring; headlong.co.uk

When it comes to “Britain’s greatest cultural export”, forget James Bond or Doctor Who, said John Nugent in Empire. The accolade surely belongs to Shaun the Sheep, the “claymation lamb with a heart of gold”, whose “silent-movie-esque antics” have made him a “hero in over 170 countries”.

This is Shaun’s third big-screen outing, spin-offs from the TV series he was awarded after making his debut in a supporting role in the 1995 Wallace and Gromit short “A Close Shave”.

In “The Beast of Mossy Bottom”, Shaun and his flock are desperate to make Jack-o’-Lanterns for Halloween. So when a freak accident knocks out their crop of prize pumpkins, Shaun decides to play mad scientist, and concocts a growth potion. Alas, it goes terribly wrong when his beloved Farmer (John Sparkes) accidentally drinks it and turns into a Bigfoot-like monster who terrorises the local village. Think “Frankenstein” crossed with “The Wolf Man”, “only with Plasticine farmyard animals”.

Aardman has delivered “another excellent family film”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian – “crammed as ever with top visual gags” and blessed with a sparklingly fun screenplay. There are clever references here to everything from “Psycho” and “The Archers” to “The Simpsons”. Look out for a hairdressing salon called Barber Black Sheep and the Stephen King pun hanging outside the pub in Mossy Bottom.

It takes Aardman’s animators a whole day to make just two seconds of footage, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times, but “you would never guess how painful the process is from the high-energy joyfulness of the result”. “I honestly can’t remember the last time I laughed more in a cinema, or wished more that I could stay for a second screening to enjoy it all again.”

Sharon Horgan’s sharp new comedy-drama “Youth” (HBO Max) “perfectly captures what it is to reach your 50s and find that it’s no walk in the park”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph.

Horgan plays Alex, a member of “the sandwich generation”, caught between the demands of being a parent and looking after her own ageing parents. She has a job as a literary agent, “where the lows include Damian Lewis (playing himself, perfectly deadpan) coming into the office and solemnly announcing that he has written a social satire called ‘Dog Meat’”. She is also divorced and tentatively stepping back into the dating scene, now that her son Ruarí (Aran Murphy) is leaving for university.

If you’re in the market for comedies about women in their 50s, this one “rings hilariously, despairingly true”.

“Thank God for Sharon Horgan,” said Rhik Samadder in The Guardian, “chronicler of all our journeys.” The sex scenes here are “hilarious and penetratingly insightful”, while the show’s depictions of the “uninspiring, Sisyphean grind of caregiving” are good enough to carry the series alone. Murphy (son of Cillian), meanwhile, delivers a “beautifully unforced” performance as Ruarí.

Horgan has become “TV royalty”, said Nick Hilton in The Independent, with a “quartet of fine shows” – “Divorce”, “Motherland”, “Catastrophe” and “Bad Sisters” – to her name. She remains “charming company” on screen, but “Youth” is missing the “pathos” of “Catastrophe” and “the nastiness” of “Motherland”. Hogan’s writing is “as warm and human as ever”, but it lacks her trademark “spark”.

The acronym Mice (money, ideology, coercion, ego) is sometimes used to describe what motivates people to betray their countries, said Oliver Bullough in The Guardian. But in Ben Macintyre’s enthralling new “work of true-espionage”, a fresh motivation emerges: erectile dysfunction.

Vladimir Kuzichkin was a KGB agent stationed in Tehran in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution. With the West “on the back foot” there, the Soviets saw an “opportunity to spread their influence south, to a strategic and oil-rich country”.

Kuzichkin’s role was “to further this aim by distributing money, arms and encouragement” to Iran’s communist party. Yet it was a job he loathed. Stressed and under constant surveillance, he was also frustrated by the corruption and incompetence of his colleagues, who’d celebrate each tiny success with “vast quantities of vodka”. All this took a toll on his marriage (to Galina), including on his performance in the bedroom.

Convinced that his problems were caused by an “overly tight foreskin”, Kuzichkin resolved to be circumcised, said Joseph Finder in The New York Times. But to prevent his “impairment” becoming known to his colleagues, he wanted the operation performed in the West.

And so, in October 1981, he entered the British Embassy in Tehran, and offered to “spy for Britain” – thus becoming, as Macintyre notes, the “first spy in history to demand, as the price of defection, the removal of his foreskin”.

Trivial though his motivations seemed, Kuzichkin’s actions had profound consequences, said James Owen in The Times. The Soviets were planning to foment a communist “coup against the ayatollahs, backed up by an armed invasion”; had this come to fruition, the US might have responded with tactical nuclear weapons.

The intelligence Kuzichkin provided alerted the UK and the US to the Soviets’ plan; MI6 informed the ayatollahs, who savagely clamped down on Iran’s communist party, ending any possibility of a coup.

The victory, however, was double-edged, said Clare Mulley in The Spectator. For in administering the “coup de grâce to Soviet aspirations”, MI6 “bolstered a murderous, fundamentalist regime” – with consequences that are still playing out today.

Redwood – named after MI6’s inadvertently humorous codename for the tall Russian – is an “enjoyable caper”, full of “twists, turns, desires, betrayals and unexpected outcomes”. And it serves as a useful reminder that “history is not solely written by great powers”; in some cases, the “very personal choices, desires and decisions” of a flawed individual can be equally important.

As autumn begins, the countryside “puts on its brightest show”, said Helen Daly and Emma-Louise Pritchard in Country Living. Now is the time to experience the season “at its most colourful” as woodland paths wind through “gold, russet and crimson”. Here are some of our favourite spots for a wholesome day out in nature across the UK.

Cannock Chase, Staffordshire

The woodland of Cannock Chase is “worth visiting all through the year, but there is something particularly special” about autumn, said Daniel Graham on BBC Countryfile. The “former medieval royal hunting forest” is mainland England’s smallest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and is also home to endangered species such as the nightjar and woodcock. October is the best time to catch glimpses of the male fallow deer rutting, or see muntjac and red deer searching for the rare Chase berry, a “blueberry-cowberry hybrid”. This 6.5-mile walk, of moderate difficulty, “explores all of these habitats and their wildlife”.

Abinger Roughs and Shere Woodlands, Surrey

The 300-year-old “ancient, gnarly oak trees” on Abinger Roughs are the perfect antidote to an “existential crisis”, said Alexandra Sims and Rhian Daly on Time Out. Just a 15-minute drive away are the Shere woodlands, which are equally tranquil. As autumn turns to winter, you begin to understand why the village of Shere made a cameo in the film “The Holiday”. But for the next few months, you’ll find yourself “amid beech, cypress, yew and dogwood trees”, in the kind of woodland which “feels like it should be much further away from a capital city than it is”.

Castle Ward, County Down

The 18th-century mansion on the shores of Strangford Lough draws visitors for its “mix of palladian and gothic architecture”, said Jen and Sim Benson in The Times. But its 800-acre estate holds many moments of excitement for autumn walkers. Stroll through the “leafy deciduous woodland and historic follies, tracing the water’s edge to the ruins of an old castle”, with only short but steep hills in the three-mile loop. “Look out for vast flocks of light-bellied brent geese arriving from the Arctic in autumn and grey seal pups, born in November.”

Teign Gorge, Devon

This stroll is “perhaps the most famous walk on Dartmoor”, said Helen Daly and Emma-Louise Pritchard in Country Living. You start off in the shadow of the “imposing bulk” of Castle Drogo – the last castle to be built in England – and move on though “areas rich in history, with incredible views and abundant wildlife”. Along the way you will reach Fingle Bridge, which dates back to the 13th century and is a “popular focal point for budding photographers”, as well as Poohsticks in the river Teign. On the way back along the river, the “dense oak woodland” is filled with “vibrant shades of yellow and orange” at this time of year.

Allen Banks, Northumberland

Allen Banks is “awesome in autumn”, said Sarah Baxter in The Telegraph. It cuts through “deepest Northumberland”, following the river in a “sheer-sided gorge”, “flanked by the most extensive area of ancient woodland in the county”. Keep an eye out for “scampering red squirrels” and little “ornamental features added by the Victorians”. Autumn brings “fiery beech and oak spilling down the valley”, and, as an added bonus, 180 different species of fungi to observe.

One of life’s greatest thrills is watching wildlife in its natural habitat. The experience is even better when the animals live in a space where they are protected and decisions about the land are guided by conservation principles. Bring your binoculars, and see for yourself at these eight wildlife preserves and refuges.

Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, California

Southern California’s Channel Islands are “called ‘North America’s Galapagos’ for a reason,” said Afar. Marine life thrives around the islands — 27 species of whales and dolphins live or pass through the area, along with elephant seals, harbor seals, sea lions, California brown pelicans and rare seabirds like the Scripps’ murrelet. It’s “common to see pods of dolphins” during ferry rides from Ventura, and you can also spot wildlife while “snorkeling, swimming and exploring tide pools.”

Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge, Florida

Established in 1983, Crystal River is the only national wildlife refuge in the U.S. created to protect the Florida manatee. Its centerpiece is the unspoiled Three Sisters Springs, where visitors can step onto elevated boardwalks for a “bird’s eye view” of the manatees swimming in “incredibly crystal-clear water,” said National Geographic. Manatee season is Nov. 15-March 31, when the marine mammals migrate to warm-water springs.

Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska

This is brown bear territory. Several thousand of the animals live in Katmai, where they eat sockeye salmon from the Brooks River to their heart’s content. During summer and into the fall, the bears famously feast in order to “build a heavy layer of fat to keep themselves warm through the glacial months,” said Outside. The biggest bruins are celebrated during Fat Bear Week, when the public votes on which one will “emerge supreme as the plumpest and most likely to survive the winter.”

Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge, Florida

If you want to see the tiny key deer, there’s one place to go. The endangered animal can only be found in the Lower Florida Keys, where they swim between islands. Once you arrive at the Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge, it’s “surprisingly easy” to find the deer, said Southern Living.

They don’t shy from people and are often spotted strolling through wetlands and forests. Because of strong conservation efforts, several hundred Key deer live in the area, up from a low of 25 in the 1950s.

Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, Georgia

Many consider Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge to be the “American South’s best-kept secret,” said National Geographic. It’s also one of the newest UNESCO World Heritage Sites, a “paradise” for visitors looking to see American alligators, American black bears, white-tailed deer, gopher tortoises and Eastern indigo snakes. Wildlife watching is a year-round event, and one of the best vantage points is the Owl’s Roost Tower above the swamp.

Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, Massachusetts

Birdwatchers flock to Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. It’s one of New England’s “premier birding destinations,” with more than 350 species recorded in the vicinity, said Travel and Leisure. Habitats include salt marsh, cranberry bogs and maritime shrubs and forests. Visitors can hike or bike along “scenic” trails to the best viewing spots.

Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, Montana

The stunning Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge is west of Yellowstone National Park, with the Centennial Mountains standing tall over forests, lakes, grasslands, marshes and sand dunes. Bears, wolves, elk, river otters and more than 200 bird species live in the preserve, including hundreds of trumpeter swans. For the best chance of seeing cygnets (baby swans), visit during May and June.

Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Kansas

A visit to this Kansas preserve almost feels like stepping back in time to the 1800s, when tallgrass prairies and bison were both plentiful. About 500,000 bison still roam in the U.S., and a “hardy” herd of about 100 lives at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, said Atlas Obscura. To see them — from an appropriate distance, of course — visit the Windmill and West Traps pastures. There, the animals gather to “graze, relax and soak up the endless sun.”

Booker Prize judge and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker said it was a “surprise” that four novels written by men have ended up on this year’s shortlist of six – because, “generally speaking, the male-written books weren’t as good as the ones written by women”. The male authors still in the running for the prestigious 2026 literary award are those who are able to “rethink their roles”.

‘Masculine authority in crisis’

This year’s shortlisted authors span a “generational arc”, stretching from 40-year-old Rebecca Perry to the “81-year-old veteran of experimental speculative fiction” M. John Harrison, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. Men outnumber women but the “novels’ subject matter” is “more revealing” than any author’s “identity characteristics”. An “overarching theme” emerges: “masculine authority in crisis – and discomfort”. These are tales of fathers, sons and husbands who are “struggling to inhabit the roles, structures and stories that are supposed to contain them”.

Luke Kennard’s brilliantly funny campus novel, “Black Bag”, sees an out-of-work actor paid to lurk inside a “leather suit bag, as status and confidence evaporate”, while Douglas Stuart “examines the weight of male expectation” in “John of John”, a story about a young gay art student who returns to his repressive home in the Hebrides. In “The Disappearers”, Marlon James charts how masculinity is “brutally policed” in a murderous homophobic attack in 1980s Jamaica. And “The End of Everything", Harrison’s “unsettling” post-apocalyptic tale, “tests the masculine survivalist fantasy of practical competence”.

The female authors on the list also turn their lens on male characters: with “domestic precision”, Elizabeth Strout portrays an increasingly isolated husband in “The Things We Never Say”, while in “May We Feed the King”, Perry follows a “reluctant medieval monarch who inherits the ultimate ‘great man’ role without wanting it”.

None of the books fulfill expectations of what a “male” novel is meant to be. Instead, they reject the very things that male protagonists would once have taken “for granted”, from sexual legitimacy and paternal authority to economic security and “mastery of the world”.

‘Are men OK?’

Last year’s winner, David Szalay’s “Flesh”, a rags-to-riches story about a Hungarian man catapulted into the world of the super-wealthy, sparked much debate about “literary fiction’s renewed interest in masculinity”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. This year’s list will only intensify the discussion, “the theme of which might be summed up as: are men OK?”

Some of the writers are “playfully experimental” and I’m glad to see Kennard’s “howlingly funny” book made the cut. His is the “most purely enjoyable” read and contains the “single best scene of any of the novels on the list (if you’ve read it you’ll know the one I’m talking about)”. I found the politics in Strout’s book about a history teacher living through “the second coming” of Donald Trump “too unsubtle”, and Perry and Kennard, “the juniors in the pack”, have “better novels to come”. If “seduced by heft”, the judges might opt for James’ “gruelling saga” but “I suspect it’s the straightforward page-turning jeopardy” of Stuart’s “John of John” that will scoop the top prize.

I’m betting on “British oddball” Harrison, said Lucy Thynne in The Telegraph. This is the first time the octogenarian cult sci-fi writer has got “so much as a look-in” at the Booker, and, if he takes the gong, he’ll be the “oldest winner in its history”. His “stunningly weird vision of the collapse of England” is a “cut above” the other contenders. “I would love it to win”.

Aardman Animations is back with its third feature starring Shaun the Sheep, “the claymation lamb with a heart of gold”, said Empire. The latest, a Halloween-themed film – “The Beast of Mossy Bottom” – sees Shaun and his loyal flock accidentally turn their “beloved if ungainly farmer” into a “Bigfoot-like monster who terrorises the local village”.

It’s 50 years since Peter Lord and David Sproxton set up Aardman, but the stop-motion animation remains “as sharp as ever” and the “commitment to silliness is genuinely admirable”. Here are some of the studio’s other prime films.

Chicken Run (2000)

Like every Aardman film, the premise is straightforward – “The Great Escape” with chickens – but “such is the animators’ ability to humanise the birds’ plight that it turns into an improbably emotional epic”, said The Guardian. Julia Sawalha gives what is arguably her best performance as the “feisty” hen Ginger who “practically forces her dozy fellow chickens to save themselves” from the “dreaded pie machine”. An instant hit, the film proved Aardman could “hold its own” in Hollywood.

Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

The first full-length Wallace and Gromit film won Best Animated Feature at the 2006 Academy Awards. The action follows the best friends as they attempt to “subdue an enormous rabbit who terrorises Tottington Hall’s vegetable gardens in the nights leading up to their annual Giant Vegetable Competition”, said Vulture. With a star-studded cast of British actors including Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes, it’s packed with humour “teetering on the line between silly and absurd”.

Arthur Christmas (2011)

This festive film about Santa Claus’ clumsy son trying to deliver a misplaced present to a little girl is “impeccably put together and goes down a treat”, said The Guardian. Filled with “terrific action sequences” including a “legion of elf-ninjas slamming millions of presents across the planet on Christmas Eve”, the story is a “little more conventional” than other Aardman films but remains a pleasurable watch.

Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015)

Inspired by Aardman’s TV series about a “clever, enterprising” sheep, the film takes the show’s “bare-bones premise and runs wild with it”, said Vulture. Shaun and his flock must travel to the city to save their amnesiac farmer “before Animal Control nabs them all”. Featuring “kid-friendly sight gags” and “adult-friendly puns”, it’s a fun watch for the whole family. But its meditation “on urban alienation” also makes it potentially “the most emotionally mature film in Aardman’s catalogue”.

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

The beloved man-and-dog pair returned for this “perfectly made” feature that sees their relationship start to strain when Wallace “begins relying too much on his robot garden gnome”, said IndieWire. Beyond its “glossy and gorgeous” claymation, what really makes the film stand out is the return of the “terrifyingly evil” Feathers McGraw – the criminal penguin from the greatest Wallace and Gromit short, “The Wrong Trousers”. It’s a must-watch.

“It has been a long time since any cultural figure arrived in New York on such a wave of high expectations,” said Adam Nagourney in The New York Times. But conductor Gustavo Dudamel, having just completed a spectacularly successful 17-year run in Los Angeles, officially stepped into the role of music and artistic director of the storied New York Philharmonic early this month, and lovers of classical music are hoping that the former wunderkind can use his new perch to revive the genre as a force in American popular culture. At 45, Dudamel “might be the most famous conductor alive today,” said Joshua Barone, also in the Times, and he achieved that notoriety by bringing a democratic touch to his chosen field not seen since Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic. “This is not a job,” said Dudamel on his first full day occupying Bernstein’s old post. “It is a mission.”

Clearly, Dudamel is “ready to hit the ground running,” said Harry Rose in The Times (U.K.). He recently closed out his run atop the Los Angeles Philharmonic with four star-studded concerts at the Hollywood Bowl while teasing his next chapter by leading the New York Philharmonic as it accompanied the Muppets in a halftime show appearance at July’s World Cup final. During his first three weeks on the job, he’ll be guiding his new orchestra through seven different programs, and started that barrage with a Sept. 10 concert at Radio City Music Hall that mixed pieces by Bernstein, George Gershwin, Arturo Márquez, and Philip Glass with appearances by pop stars Lizzo and St. Vincent. More-traditional fare was prepared for Dudamel’s first concerts of the season at Lincoln Center’s new David Geffen Hall. However those come off, it’s clear that New York now has “a dynamic, populist conductor to match its dynamic, populist mayor.”

The pressure isn’t new for Dudamel, said Mattie Kahn in Vogue. He was just 23 when he won a prestigious conducting competition in Germany and classical music first greeted him as a savior. Ever since, he’s been “radiating the kind of star power more often associated with pop princes and athletes than classical musicians.” Like Bernstein, he’s “understood that classical music needed an evangelist and a face.” The music, he says, must be honest and fully felt, but if there’s a reason that high schoolers in New York shriek when he passes by and that there’s hope that classical music’s audience could get younger, “it’s Dudamel’s charisma, not his knack for interpreting Chopin.”

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Eriq La Salle, the Emmy-winning former co-star of the TV series ER, is also the author of an ongoing thriller series. The latest entry, Laws of Solomon, follows hitman Solomon Nangobi to Los Angeles, where the former child soldier takes a boy in danger under his wing. Below are his six favorite books.

‘The Godfather’ by Mario Puzo (1969)

The tale was most famously turned into the film by Francis Ford Coppola, but I’ve always preferred the book. The themes Puzo explores, most notably if evil is inherited or learned, is one that I grapple with constantly in my own work. Buy it here.

‘Man on Fire’ by Philip Nicholson (1980)

This tale of a washed-up ex-mercenary who must protect a young girl after a bodyguard job goes wrong has all the ingredients for a great thriller story: gritty action, brutal killings, and untrustworthy characters. But what makes me love it is that it also has all the hallmarks of a deep character study. Buy it here.

‘The 48 Laws of Power’ by Robert Greene (1998)

This is a nonfiction book, a collection of tips about obtaining and exercising power drawn from the counsel of Machiavelli, The Art of War, etc. One of the most fascinating books there is on “survival” in human society, it is vicious and uncompromising. It’s also uncomfortable to think that people who study this book may be enacting its tenets on you or those around you. Buy it here.

‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison (1987)

I have many favorite Toni Morrison books, so it was difficult to choose just one. Beloved tells the story of a former slave whose home is haunted by a malevolent spirit, inferred to be the woman’s murdered baby daughter. Sometimes storytelling can convey a historical truth more subtly than actual history, and Morrison does so tenfold here. Buy it here.

‘The Cartel’ by Don Winslow (2015)

In this heavily researched and bloody novel, Winslow chronicles one decade—2004 to 2014—in the Mexican-American drug wars. The book is an insanely relevant bloodbath, with a “ripped from the headlines” feeling that sticks to you long after you put it down. Buy it here.

‘The Winter of Frankie Machine’ by Don Winslow (2006)

This Winslow novel, about a retired hitman, is softer than many of his others, and I love it for that reason. It’s a sad, lonely tale drenched in both blood and the L.A. sun. Its noir style, decades older even than Frankie Machine, is one that I sought to achieve in the first few pages of Laws of Solomon. Buy it here.

‘The Disappearers’ by Marlon James

“Why not just say it?” asked Dwight Garner in The New York Times. With his sixth book in an already decorated career, Marlon James “has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.” At 600- plus pages, The Disappearers is “a maximalist’s banquet” constructed from a simple story premise: In 1988 Jamaica, several closeted gay men are rehearsing a play in a house in Kingston when a homophobic mob storms in, killing one victim, blinding another, brutally beating the rest, and leaving the survivors forever changed. Still, “it’s hard to talk about this novel because there are at least two dozen ways to pick it up,” whether you’re interested in what James, a Jamaican native, has to say about violence, sex, pop culture, gay feeling, revenge, exile, or fathers and sons. The book “sank knives deep into my heart,” and “I’m still in recovery from it.”

Two young men, Eddy Porteus and Jordan Brown, hold the center of this “unforgettable” work, said Laura Miller in Slate. “Eddy and Jordan aren’t friends exactly,” and up until the mob attack, their experiences of Jamaica’s virulent homophobia vary significantly. But when two other members of the acting troupe vanish after leaving the hospital, they team up to find them. Throughout the book, as in his previous novels, James “invents his own literary language, horny yet tender, punctuated by puns and music and elegant flourishes,” said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe. And as the story drifts to Miami, London, New York, and back to Kingston again, it’s held together by James’ passion for the era’s pop culture and his characters’ will to survive in the face of hatred. Thanks to its sweep and power, it’s a novel that “will be read decades from now, pored over in seminars and bookmarked on subway commutes.”

While “there’s no denying” that The Disappearers is a great novel, it’s “also an ordeal,” said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter. It “aspires to sear in the minds of readers the horrors of living in a world hostile to homosexuality,” and in that, it’ll succeed. But “James’ commitment to erotic realism, to the mechanics of oral and anal sex, voluntary and violent, is total and relentless,” and the book is in part “an encyclopedia of abuse and degradation.” I finished it “glad to have read it but equally glad to be done with it.” Even so, “what’s most surprising, given the book’s abiding terrors, is how James inches it erratically toward the light,” providing late glimpses of a few gay characters who not only survive but thrive. It’s easy to imagine that this “incomparable” work will be a beacon to more than a few young readers enduring violent hatred wherever it arises today.

‘American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump’ by Kai Bird

“I gobbled up every page of Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel,” said Laura Miller in Slate, “and I’m not sure how I feel about that.” The book’s subject, lawyer Roy Cohn, was a mobbed-up liar and cheater who helped manufacture the postwar Red Scare, assisted in sending Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair, demonized homosexuals despite being gay himself, and eventually mentored the young Donald Trump. Bird, who co- authored American Prometheus, the award-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, this time teamed with his researcher wife, Susan Goldmark, to create a book that’s “a cornucopia of mid-century sleaze and addictive for just that reason.” It’s a story packed with “Mafia hits and blackmail and election tampering,” and because Trump’s resentful populism mirrors Cohn’s, it’s a tale that’s “turned out to be seminal in American politics.”

“In Bird’s telling, the parallels between Cohn and Trump begin with their childhoods,” said Kim Phillips-Fein in The Atlantic. Both grew up in outer-borough New York City, and both had well-connected fathers who helped launch their careers. After the Bronx-bred Cohn helped prosecute the Rosenbergs, he teamed with U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy to mount a sweeping anti-Communist hunt. When a backlash sent him back to New York, he was repeatedly indicted but eluded criminal conviction. After meeting Trump in 1973, he schooled the future president in certain rules of the power game, including answering every attack with a counterattack and never admitting wrongdoing.

In his long-ago heyday, “Roy Cohn made for good copy,” said Philip Terzian in The Wall Street Journal. But while Bird’s book reviews Cohn’s colorful career in great detail, “all the entertaining stories are spoiled in the service of an underlying thesis—Cohn as linchpin of modern conservative politics—that grows less persuasive with repetition.” Cohn in fact held national power only briefly, and his transactional later friendship with Trump “scarcely” qualifies as formative. Clearly, while Cohn’s historic significance remains slight, “his status as a menacing specter in the minds of liberal journalists has only grown.”

Japanese animated series based on popular manga have long been an internationally loved medium in both television and film. These anime series are the best of the best, spanning decades and ever-evolving art styles.

‘Attack on Titan’ (2013-2023)

While it is one of the newer entries, “Attack on Titan” is regarded by many as the “most popular modern anime series,” said Slash Film. It follows Eren Yeager, who joins an elite military squad in a future where humanity is “hunted and consumed by giant monstrosities” called “titans” and is forced to “live in fear in walled survival communities.”

Produced by WIT Studio and MAPPA, this “dizzying adaptation” of Hajime Isayama’s post-apocalyptic dark fantasy series captivated fans for a decade. It “successfully built a broad audience” consisting not only of “diehard anime and manga fans” eager to see its “horrific imagery and action translated from page to screen” but also “newcomers to the medium.” More than its accessibility, “Attack on Titan” has been praised for its “narrative and thematic depth.” (Crunchyroll, Hulu, Netflix)

‘Cowboy Bebop’ (1997-1998)

Cult classic “Cowboy Bebop” is unique: an original series created specifically for the anime medium by Shinichiro Watanabe with Sunrise Studios, drawing on a “wide array of pop culture influences” that were as “eclectic as the series itself,” said Slash Film. The show had only a 26-episode run and a movie in 2001, but it remains one of the most celebrated series in the genre.

The series combines “echoes of filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa,” said Slash Film, with “stylistic movements” borrowed from the "French New Wave and Hong Kong martial arts cinema” to make a “dazzlingly jazzy space spectacle that works better than it has any right to.” (Crunchyroll, Netflix)

‘Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood’ (2009-2010)

Some anime struggle to balance laying out “intricate world-building” with a “cast of memorable characters, iconic moments and thrilling fights,” IGN said. That’s what “makes ‘Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood’ so special.”

The framing device for fans’ “entry into this sprawling world is one of sympathy,” said IGN. It is easy to understand why the Elric brothers practice forbidden alchemy to try to resurrect their mother at the cost of their physical bodies. That quest guides them through a “world of monsters, government conspiracy and divinity.” And “despite all this elegance, ‘FMA: Brotherhood’” also knows when to “lay it all bare” in “unforgettable moments” that will “leave you standing in front of your TV cheering for the Elric brothers.” (Crunchyroll, Hulu, Netflix)

‘One Piece’ (1999-present)

Written by Eiichiro Oda, “One Piece” is the “best-selling manga series of all time,” said Collider. Die-hard fans of the anime adaptation have weathered more than 1,100 episodes since 1999.

The series follows the exploits of Luffy and his pirate crew in their search for the eponymous One Piece. For over 25 years, Toei Animation has “produced epic, sprawling adventure sagas worthy of the manga’s legendary reputation,” said Slash Film. There’s a reason “One Piece” is “regarded as one of the ‘Big Three’ shonen anime series of the 2000s.” Alongside “Naruto” and “Bleach,” the show helped define the shonen subgenre, which is primarily marketed to young boys aged 12 to 18, creating a generation of super fans. Newcomers may find the much shorter Netflix live-action series more accessible. (Crunchyroll, Hulu, Netflix)

Sailor Moon (1992-1997)

The crown gem of the Magical Girl subgenre, Naoko Takeuchi’s “Sailor Moon” is one of the most “globally recognized anime series of all time,” IGN. Schoolgirl Usagi and her unexpected role as the titular Sailor Moon is a “classic for a reason.” She is a gateway anime for many girls and women.

The show’s “gorgeous animation, stunning character designs” and an “all-time great transformation sequence” make this the “granddaddy of all magical girl anime.” It helps that each of the Sailor Scouts is “as well built-out and unique as Sailor Moon,” allowing audiences to “find their own favorites” as they revisit the “hilarious, heartfelt and action-packed” series over the years. (Hulu)

“Britain is now a nation of ‘shoulder seasoners’,” said The Times. For the “uninitiated” that means more of us are choosing to travel in May or September to avoid the crowds and soaring temperatures associated with peak summer holiday months.

Most of Europe’s “classic beach destinations” are more affordable in September when the kids go back to school. “But beware the weather.” While places like Faro in Portugal’s Algarve are still warm come autumn, the Atlantic Ocean can be “bracing”. If it’s sun you’re after, the further south you go “the better”.

For “reliable” October half-term temperatures of around 26C during the day, consider booking a trip to the Canary Islands. H10 Costa Adeje Palace in southwest Tenerife is right next to La Enramada beach, from which it’s easy to set out on “nice walks that spiral around the coast”.

If you love history, consider a last-minute trip to Greece. There’s “more room to breathe”, shorter queues for top archaeological sites, and you’ll be able to “relish the hike up to the Parthenon without melting in the heat”, said Condé Nast Traveller. A road trip that “traces the coast of the rugged and mountainous Peloponnese peninsula” is a great way to explore – as long as you’re prepared that it might be too chilly to take a dip.

Puglia is another excellent option for shoulder-season travellers, said The Independent. Outdoor enthusiasts won’t go wrong with a five-day, self-guided walk with Ramble Worldwide. Soak up the “beauties” of the coast as you weave your way from Otranto to Lecce “stopping for refreshing swims” while your luggage is taken ahead to your accommodation.

Or, head to Slovenia for “Habsburg-related history” and “cool wine regions” at a fraction the cost of neighbouring Austria, said The Times. By October, “the treeline cuts a russet-and-copper swathe across the Slovenian countryside as it climbs towards the mountains”. Begin your trip in Ljubljana and end up in Bohinj at its beautiful spa hotel overlooking the Julian Alps. Bliss.

“The new business-casual aesthetic has permeated not just politics (where relatability is more important now than gravitas) but all modern professions,” said Joseph Bullmore in The Sunday Times. And the tie, “which has declined steadily in health and relevance over the past decade or more”, appears to be the “victim of changing formalities”.

Feigning maturity

“The tie used to be what the boss wore; the symbol of power”, said Bullmore, but now it’s “almost solely” a gesture of subservience or service: “the graduate at the job interview, feigning at maturity; the doting waiter at the Mayfair members’ club”. Meanwhile, a photo taken at the 2022 G7 summit showed the “collected leaders of the world” with “their collars gaping louchely open, like a parade of ushers come 10pm at a Surrey wedding”.

Sales of ties have decreased by 7.5% year-on-year over the past five years, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity. However, the picture is less bleak than it may appear: second-hand clothing platform Depop reported a 42% rise in searches for ties in the six months to February.

“I don’t think ties are completely dead, they’re just having a down moment,” Guy Hills, a fashion photographer and owner of London clothing shop Dashing Tweed, told The Guardian. For a younger generation “more interested in sustainability and proper clothing”, he said, the tie is ripe for a comeback.

Sign of rebellion

Indeed, successive obituaries for the necktie have proved “premature”, said The Art of Manliness: the necktie has “kept on beating the odds”.

A previous generation saw the tie as an “office relic” and traded it in for the freedom of “open collars and elevated loungewear”, but for younger people it has become “a sign of rebellion”, wrote Shane C. Kurup on Country & Town House.

Inspired by the experimental styles of celebrity aficionados like Harry Styles, ties with “regimental stripes, natty foulards and 80s abstract-print silks” are “being worn excessively long, a touch short, layered up, undone, tucked in or backwards”. Dior, Hermès, and Saint Laurent all featured neckties in their Spring 2026 collections.

Menswear “tends to move in cycles” and after “periods of looseness, where comfort becomes the dominant language of getting dressed”, there’s “a pull back toward structure”, wrote Ryan Fidell on the Vintage Tie Shop. After a decade that “leaned hard into casual”, the tie is “interesting again”.

How are boys and men struggling? 

Young men are falling behind women in nearly every area of life. In academic performance, boys lag well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where female undergraduates now outnumber their male peers roughly 2 to 1. That ratio was about even in the early 1980s. Most men have seen their real wages fall over the past four decades, and a growing share of young men are dropping out of the workforce. They have fewer friends than women and are three times as likely to suffer “deaths of despair” from alcohol or drugs, or by suicide. In a post-#MeToo world where the word “masculinity” is frequently preceded by “toxic,” experts say young men often encounter two competing narratives: one from the Right telling them to become a hyper-macho caricature, modeled by President Trump and manosphere influencers, and another from the Left implying they should keep quiet because they’re so privileged. “This is not a zero-sum game,” said New York University business professor Scott Galloway. “Women still face huge challenges, but we can also acknowledge our young men are struggling.”

When does the trouble start? 

At a very young age. Boys enter kindergarten behind girls in terms of academic preparedness and in behavioral skills, such as the ability to socialize and regulate emotions. That gender gap continues throughout school: Girls score better on reading and writing tests— they are almost a full grade ahead of boys by ninth grade—and earn higher GPAs. Boys, meanwhile, are roughly twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and twice as likely to be suspended; they also drop out at higher rates than their female classmates. Researchers believe some of this disparity could be a result of the increasing emphasis on academics and testing in the earliest years of education, which may make the learning experience harder for boys, who mature later than girls. Educators and policymakers have also spent several decades focused on correcting historical gender inequalities that held back girls. But some experts worry that educational excellence itself is now “coded” as female, discouraging boys.

What happens after school?

The decline of traditionally male-dominated industries such as manufacturing have hit men’s pay and employment potential. Inflation-adjusted wages for men dropped 3% from 1979 to 2019, while those of women—who earn 81 cents for every dollar earned by men—rose nearly 29%. And of the 1.2 million new jobs added between February 2024 and February 2026, about two-thirds went to women. That pattern is likely to be replicated in future jobs reports as sectors with large shares of women workers, such as health care and social services, continue to expand while male-heavy sectors like construction and tech either shrink or stagnate. Faced with these difficulties, a growing number of young men are simply giving up on employment. Today, nearly 1 in 9 prime-age men are neither working nor looking for work, and about 1 in 5 men ages 25 to 34 still live with their parents, compared with 1 in 10 women in that demographic.

Does this affect men’s mental health? 

It’s causing a crisis of loneliness. Men ages 18 to 30 spent 18% more time alone in 2023 than in 2019—an average of 6.6 nonsleeping hours—according to time-use surveys by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s 22% more alone time than same-age women. “The more that you’re sitting on the couch,” said Gary Barker, head of progressive gender-equality group Equimundo, “your social network gets narrower and then you don’t have the social capital or the skills to step into a job.” In an Equimundo poll, almost two-thirds of men ages 18 to 30 said nobody knew them well; a quarter hadn’t seen anyone outside their home in the past week. Dan and Joana Moreno of Miami have seen this crisis play out in their family. Their daughter finished business school and got engaged in 2024; that year, their three adult sons were all single and still living at home. Middle son Daniel, 27, dropped out of college in 2019. “Nothing is really stopping me,” he said. “It’s just myself, standing in my own way.”

Where does that aimlessness lead?

Experts believe it’s to blame for a sharp increase in the suicide rate among men ages 25 to 34, which climbed 30% from 2010 to 2023. Social isolation, said psychologist Matthew Nock, means men are “less likely to reach out for care [and] less well connected to others.” Feelings of isolation and a lack of purpose are also pushing young men toward the manosphere, a loose network of online communities and misogynist influencers such as the hugely popular Andrew Tate—who with his brother, Tristan, is fighting extradition to the U.K. on charges of rape and sex trafficking—that promote male dominance and blame men’s woes on a “feminized” society. “These spaces are really taking advantage of those insecurities and a need for validation,” said Kalliopi Mingeirou of U.N. Women.

Can young men get back on track? 

Many experts note that the gender gap in academic achievement can be addressed, as shown by the fact that girls have caught up in math with boys in recent years. “So we could help boys catch up in reading,” said Sean Reardon, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. “We just haven’t organized society and schools yet to do that.” Richard Reeves, head of the nonpartisan American Institute for Boys and Men, argues for boys to start kindergarten at age 6 rather than 5, so they’re better cognitively matched with girls, and for more men to be encouraged to enter more-heavily female professions, such as nursing and teaching. “It is not that men have fewer opportunities,” he said. “It is that they are not taking them.” Reeves adds that it’s in all of society’s interest to help lift up boys and young men. “A world of floundering men,” he says, “is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.”

Sonoma County has a reputation for outstanding wineries. Cool Pacific breezes and a variety of soils make this stretch of Northern California a perfect place to grow grapes. But there’s more to the region than its vineyards. These six refreshing options present Sonoma County in a different light, showcasing both nature and culture.

Take a walk on the wild side at Safari West

It’s easy to forget where you are during a visit to the wildlife preserve Safari West. Spread across 400 acres in the hills of Santa Rosa, Safari West is home to more than 900 animals, including giraffes, zebras, rhinos, flamingos, cape buffalo and impalas. As you make your way through the vast property on a guided open-air vehicle tour (sit on the roof for an extra thrill), it feels like you’re driving around the plains of Tanzania, waiting for the Great Migration to start.

Safari West was founded in 1993 by Nancy and Peter Lang as a wildlife conservation and education center. No two tours are alike; guides follow the animals’ lead and stay back, giving visitors the chance to appreciate the wildlife without encroaching. Along the way, guides share insights, and tours will stay in habitats longer when the animals are active and playing together or eating.

The fun doesn’t have to end once a tour is over. Guests can spend the night in one of Safari West’s custom-finished safari tents from Botswana. Each comes with a private bathroom, ceiling fan, space heater and viewing deck, and a continental breakfast. After dark, expect to hear the park’s nocturnal animals.

Stare up in awe at the Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve

For more than 1,000 years, the towering coastal redwoods at this natural reserve near Guerneville have stood tall, providing shade and tranquility. The wheelchair-accessible Pioneer Nature Trail passes by the Colonel Armstrong Tree, believed to be more than 1,400 years old and the oldest in the grove; the Icicle Tree, covered with substantial burl formations; and the Parson Jones Tree, the tallest in the park at more than 310 feet. The protected reserve covers 805 acres and is a reminder of what the landscape looked like before logging began in the 19th century.

Stop at downtown Guerneville for a heavenly buttermilk biscuit at Piknik Town Market. Order one with jam and butter, or go savory and get a biscuit topped with vegetarian gravy or stuffed with bacon, lettuce and tomato. While waiting for your breakfast, look around and shop for locally made shirts, hats, candles and tchotchkes. There are several stores along the main drag, including the whimsical Guerneville 5&10 filled with gifts, candy, greeting cards, art supplies and more.

Embrace a childhood favorite at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center

The gang’s all here. Charlie Brown, Woodstock, Lucy, Linus and, of course, Snoopy are celebrated at the cheerful Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa.

“Peanuts” creator Schulz moved to Sonoma County in the late 1950s, and the museum is filled with his personal artifacts. They include mementos from his childhood and military service and murals he painted for his children’s bedrooms, plus original comic panels, a recreation of Schulz’s studio and an impressive tile piece made of more than 3,500 “Peanuts” strips. In the Education Room, visitors can be creative too, drawing characters and making animations for zoetropes.

Across the street is Snoopy’s Home Ice, an indoor skating rink Schulz built in 1969, where youe can “lace up your skates for public sessions and lessons” or “cheer on” the Santa Rosa Growlers hockey team, said Travel and Leisure. At The Warm Puppy Café, hot cocoa is a popular treat year-round, and Snoopy’s Gallery & Gift Shop offers “Peanuts” T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, magnets, stuffed animals and “all the other merch you could imagine.”

Float down the Russian River

During the summer, “dawdlers of all kinds” head to the Russian River with their “kayaks, canoes, inner tubes — just about anything that will float,” said the Los Angeles Times. Starting in Guerneville, revelers glide past redwoods, vineyards, beaches and other “scenery that might as well be a Northern California highlight reel.” This area is filled with small, “quirky” communities like Monte Rio and Forestville, where you can rent equipment.

Go for a swim at Francis Ford Coppola Winery

This isn’t your typical winery. Academy Award-winning filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola purchased this Geyserville property in 2006 and used it as another canvas for his storytelling.

While designing the estate, Coppola was inspired by Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens and classic amusement parks, and wanted the property to be a place where people could gather for activities beyond drinking wine — a “rarity among vineyards,” said Secret San Francisco. There is a “massive” pool surrounded by comfortable loungers, along with cabins that have a private shower and changing area, a bocce court and a movie gallery.

Visitors can take a self-guided audio tour through the curated gallery, which features memorabilia from Coppola’s films and life, including Don Corleone’s desk from “The Godfather,” surfboards from “Apocalypse Now,” a Tucker Torpedo car from 1948 and several Oscar statuettes. After your tour, lunch at Rustic is only a few steps away. Offering a “quintessential Sonoma Wine Country dining experience,” Rustic focuses on seasonal ingredients grown on property and traditional Italian dishes, said USA Today. Pastas are made in-house, the pizzas are wood-fired and a bag of delicious savory zeppole is presented at the start of every meal. Save room for dessert: The house-made sorbetto is fantastic.

Enjoy R&R at the retro cool Flamingo Resort & Spa

Flamingo Resort and Spa opened in Santa Rosa in 1957 and “wears its midcentury influence on its sleeve,” said The Michelin Guide. The 10-acre, pet-friendly property is anchored by a huge pool, where guests can splash away from morning until well into the night. Renovated rooms are “midcentury in inspiration and totally modern in their comforts,” with mini-refrigerators, coffee and tea stations and floor-to-ceiling windows with blackout curtains.

Guests have access to tennis and pickleball courts and a fitness center offering spin, yoga, a sauna and a steam room, and barre and aerobic classes. For a relaxing massage or facial, head to the spa, and for dinner, look no further than the Lazeaway Club. Sit outside on the patio overlooking the pool and enjoy the delicious Cal-Pacific cooking, like the bulgogi burger with umami fries, bibimbap bowl and seared salmon with shimeji mushrooms in a coconut-lemongrass broth. End the night at the Vintage Space for live music, dance parties and Thursday night stand-up shows with Don’t Tell Comedy.

Catherine Garcia was a guest of Sonoma County Tourism

“Strictly Come Dancing” returned on Saturday, bringing “plenty of promising twinkle” and “some inevitable nerves”, said Liz Edwards in The Sunday Times.

In the launch show, celebrity contestants including Dani Dyer and Sarah Storey were partnered up with their professional dancers in a “sequinned spectacle” ahead of the first live performances next week.

This year, the seasonal stalwart has undergone a “‘Doctor Who’-like regeneration”. The accomplished presenting duo of Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman departed after the last series, and have been replaced with seasoned TV host Emma Willis, former “Strictly” dancer Johannes Radebe and comedian Josh Widdicombe. After their debut show, the judges’ scores are in.

‘Played a blinder’

“There’s a lot riding on this new series”, the country’s final link “to a time when joy, sparkle and diversity brought the nation together”, said Emine Saner in The Guardian.

The new trio have nailed a “can’t-quite-believe-we-got-the-gig humility combined with superfan credentials, which is absolutely the right note”. Willis is a “class act” with bags of experience, Widdicombe is at his “best when he’s given the space to gently rib the contestants”, and Radebe’s “air of gentle benevolence” is “genuinely fresh”. “Maybe I just really want it to work”, but overall “the signs are good”.

“‘Strictly’ has played a blinder,” said Sarah Carson in The i Paper. There were fears the departure of Daly and Winkleman from the show “spelled its demise”, but “all it took was one dance” to put us at ease: a “sublimely thrilling, playful opener loaded with details for superfans”. There was much speculation about the new hosts, but frankly, “Pingu could have been presenting and it would still be the slickest programme on television”.

With Willis, we’re in “safe hands”, and Radebe’s experience in the studio makes him look “at home”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. But “schoolboy” Widdicombe “looks out of place alongside this glam duo”, turning it into an “awkward throuple”.

The “fluid” set-up, where the new hosts moved between the dancefloor and what was previously the “Clauditorium”, looked like “musical chairs”, said Frances Taylor in Radio Times. Overall, the trio “weren’t ah-may-zing… but they also weren’t a dis-ah-ster” either. The real test will be next week, when the show is live and there “really will be nowhere to hide”.

‘Worst’ celeb line-up yet

Other revamps are working well, said Edwards in The Sunday Times. There are five new professional dancers and a new way of announcing “celeb-pro” pairings, which gives proceedings a “hint of jeopardy”. Instead of pre-recorded announcements, and pairs walking down the stairs arm in arm, the partners were revealed “via a sort of pass-the-parcel dance routine, or spangly spin the bottle”. It was “chaotic, but it worked”.

Still, there are clouds surrounding the show, including some questioning whether it had become too repetitive and “lost its lustre for celebrity contestants”. Viewing figures have slumped, but even the current audience of around 7.8 million per episode is something that rival programmes would “give their eye teeth for”.

In recent years, the regularity of trying to figure out “who on earth the celebrities are” on “Strictly” is becoming as “steady as a rotating glitterball”, said Taylor in Radio Times. Without a doubt, the “calibre of star signings seems to dip every year” – “if you’ve heard of more than, say, five of the names taking part, give yourself a pat on the back”. Sadly, this line-up “really is the worst yet”.

The show has many flaws: the “D-listers, the judging, the pretence that half of these people haven’t had years of dance experience”, said Singh in The Telegraph. Yet every year millions flock to it and, ratings permitting, we are again set to fall in love with “contestants we hadn’t heard of a month before”.

The lunchbox that’s been “lurking” at the back of the cupboard for the last few years “may finally be heading back to work”, said Andrew Ellson in The Times. Fewer of us are popping into Pret a Manger for a sandwich as more office workers are “rediscovering the packed lunch”.

As prices at high street shops continue to soar, polling from Ocado has found that more than two thirds (69%) of professionals think buying lunch out is too expensive. Almost half (46%) of them have started to bring in lunch from home more often than they did a year ago.

But a packed lunch doesn’t have to mean soggy sandwiches or a “punishment tub of undressed baby spinach and slimy sweet potato chunks”, said Jimi Famurewa in The Guardian. Instead, you can get creative with “punchy, textural riots” like Rukmini Iyer’s tasty chapati omelette rolls or Rosie Birkett’s celeriac, apple and lentil salad “brightened by lemony mayonnaise and an enlivening lick of dijon mustard”. Or, if there’s a kettle nearby, consider making Tamal Ray’s “veg-filled, rainbow-hued riff on everyone’s favourite additive-stuffed hangover salve: the noodle pot”.

For something easy but “great for gut health”, try whipping up a batch of ancient grains (you can use a Merchant Gourmet pouch from the supermarket) with feta and avocado, said Xanthe Clay in The Telegraph. Pack in as many vegetables as you like and add pumpkin seeds for a tasty lunch that will “boost your diet diversity” and deliver slow-release energy.

If you prefer a hearty lunch that will warm you up as the weather cools down, consider making a homemade minestrone with parmesan meatballs. Ideal for cooking at the weekend and freezing in batches, it “always tastes better the next day”.

Another brilliant recipe to “add to your repertoire” is an “oh-so-comforting” vegan chickpea and cauliflower dahl, said Good Housekeeping. Filled with “fragrant” spices and plenty of vegetables, it’s perfect served with “cooling” yoghurt, steamed rice or naan bread.

Healdsburg, Calif.

This 1988 Mediterranean-style home in Sonoma County has a C-shaped library with a windowed reading nook. The main four-bedroom features a double-height foyer, hardwood floors, coffered ceilings, an all-white kitchen, a curved staircase, and a dining room with arch-topped French doors.

The 10-plus-acre lot also has a detached studio, a vineyard and gardens, and an entertainment area with a pergola, kitchen, fireplace, pool, and sports courts. $7,950,000. Lisa Albertson, Vanguard Properties/Luxury Portfolio International, (415) 450-7768

Matinecock, N.Y.

Accessed by a spiral staircase, the library in this 1968 modernist home on Long Island’s North Shore has leafy views and is tucked under the curved roofline. The four-bedroom’s great room includes 19-foot wood ceilings, stone floors, and glass walls.

On the property’s 5 acres, the botanist owner has grown specimen plants, trees, and a meadow garden, complemented by an outdoor sculpture, walking paths, and a Native American geological landmark. $3,875,000. Paul Mateyunas, Douglas Elliman Real Estate, (516) 816-0301

Waterville Valley, N.H.

Located on Snow’s Mountain in the White Mountain National Forest, this 1995 four-bedroom Gothic-revival home is owned by Robin Cook, the author of Coma and other best-selling novels, and features the private, glass-walled cupola office where he worked.

The home also includes a living room with a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace, a dining room with dramatic wallpaper, and a green marble primary bath. The wooded 1-acre lot is minutes from town and a ski resort. $1,999,000. Mike Aronson, Waterville Valley Realty, (603) 236-8333 ext. 18

Scituate, Mass.

Near the coast about an hour from Boston, this four-bedroom 1893 Tudor was once the Pierce Memorial Library. A cherrywood-clad office includes built-ins, paneling, coffered ceilings, and a bourbon bar, while the home’s living room has 20-foot ceilings, a limestone fireplace, and split stairs to a loft den with a pool table.

On the nearly 1-acre lot are mature trees and a flat backyard with a stone fireplace, patio, and fountain. $1,799,000. Julie McCarthy, Compass, (774) 249-2172

London

Built for a painter, then owned by a pianist, this three-bedroom, Arts and Crafts–style townhouse in the affluent Chelsea neighborhood is several doors from A.A. Milne’s house of 20 years, where he wrote the Winnie-the-Pooh books.

The updated three-story home has wood floors, a modern kitchen, a library with built-ins, and two offices with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Outside is a terrace; multiple famed bookstores are nearby. $8,466,540. Stacy Sims, Knightsbridge—United Kingdom Sotheby’s International Realty, +44 2046 130200

Portland, Ore.

In the Pearl District, this 2004 one-bedroom condo is across the street from Powell’s City of Books—known as the largest bookstore in the world. The contemporary home includes high ceilings, hardwood floors, a kitchen with stone counters, a bedroom with a walk-in closet, and in-unit laundry.

A covered terrace has city and mountain views. Dining, shopping, and a park are all within walking distance. $469,000. Chad Estes, Coldwell Banker Bain, (503) 867-6388

With fall on the horizon, now is the perfect time to keep yourself warm by dancing the night away. Say hello to autumn with some big-name artists headlining tours across the country and the world.

Bryson Tiller

Rapper Bryson Tiller found mainstream success in 2015, and since then has become a star-powered name in the rap and R&B space. Fans can catch him live during the “Neo Trapsoul” tour.

The name of the tour is an homage to Bryson’s 2015 breakthrough studio album “Trapsoul” and runs across three continents. This will be a “celebration of more than a decade of music, giving fans a chance to experience the sound that put him on the map in a full live-show format,” said SeatGeek. One of Tiller’s “most ambitious headline runs to date.” (through January 2027)

Ella Langley

Country music singer Ella Langley had a massive Billboard hit with her April 2026 LP “Dandelion,” and the Alabama native is supporting the album’s success with her ongoing “The Dandelion” tour. The series takes Langley across the United States and marks her first-ever arena shows.

They will feature “90-minute sets packed with crowd singalongs, emotional storytelling and a closing moment” with Langley’s longtime collaborator Riley Green, said SeatGeek. People who see Langley live are “not just going to a concert — you’re witnessing a once-in-a-generation breakout while it’s still unfolding.” (through March 2027)

Karol G

Fewer names are bigger in reggaeton than Karol G, and the Colombian superstar is no stranger to world tours. Her latest, “Viajando Por El Mundo”, takes Karol G across three continents and began around the same time she released her latest studio album, “No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto.”

The tour is a “celebration of not only Karol’s influence but cultura that binds millions,” said Rolling Stone. While “some transitions” in the show are a “bit clunky,” this is a performance that is “confident, strong, sexy, secure” and “full of heart.” (through July 2027)

Latto

Latto rose to prominence after a stint on a reality television show in 2016 and quickly rose through the ranks of the rap genre. Since then, she’s put out four albums, including one earlier this year, and is currently crisscrossing the United States and Canada supporting Doja Cat on the “Tour Ma Vie” tour.

While Doja Cat may be the concert’s star, Latto has a major supporting role, with her own unique style of rap. This is the latest of several collaborations between the two artists. (through December)

Lil Wayne

Few rappers have had a bigger career than Lil Wayne, and his six-set album series “Tha Carter” remains a rap tentpole. 22 years after the initial LP in the set was released, Lil Wayne is celebrating the albums with his “20 Years of Carter Classics” tour.

These concerts feature another major rap name: 2 Chainz is accompanying Lil Wayne for the majority of the stops. The tour is essentially an extension of Lil Wayne’s 2025 shows promoting the most recent “Tha Carter” album released last year. (through October)

Metallica

Legendary metal band Metallica wrapped their last tour only a few months ago but is back on stage again. Following the success of the band’s three-year “M72” world concerts, Metallica has landed in Las Vegas for a months-long residency at the Sphere.

The show, titled “Life Burns Faster,” features Metallica’s “entire catalog, enhanced by the venue’s immersive technologies that will allow you to experience the ’Tallica sound in new experiential dimensions,” said the band’s website. The Sphere shows “deliver a totally unique experience each and every night.” (through March 2027)

Olivia Rodrigo

Olivia Rodrigo has had a stratospheric rise since her start on the Disney Channel, transforming into one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Now Rodrigo’s fanbase can catch her latest globetrotting effort, “The Unraveled” tour.

The shows, which supports Rodrigo’s third LP, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” span cities in North America and Europe. They also come on the heels of Rodrigo’s news-making performance at the Daisy Chain Fields Music Festival, where she was “sharing the stage with music legends Stevie Nicks, Sarah McLachlan and Alanis Morissette,” said USA Today. (through May 2027)

Ozuna

Ozuna has become one of Puerto Rico’s most famous singers and is known for blending a variety of Latin genres. He is back on the road with his “Una Aventura” tour, marking Ozuna’s first concert series in four years.

The international tour spans Europe and Latin America and “presents a show designed to revisit the most important moments of his musical journey,” said ColombiaOne. The show includes “some of the biggest hits that established him as one of the leading figures in Latin urban music.” (through November)

Tame Impala

For a unique concert experience and musical sound, check out Tame Impala’s latest outing, the “Deadbeat” tour. The shows, supporting the Australian electronic band’s 2025 studio album of the same name, highlight two songs that have made waves across the charts this year: “Dracula” and “Loser.”

The performance itself has received critical acclaim and is a “fully enveloping sensory experience” that goes “far beyond the expected ‘live concert,’” said Rock Cellar magazine. It includes Tame Impala performing on a “pulsating platform that resembles a “spacecraft about to take flight.” (through July 2027)

Teddy Swims

Teddy Swims is the answer, if you want another genre-blending artist to see live. Since his breakthrough in 2023, the Georgia-born artist has embarked on a slew of concerts, including his latest, the “Ugly” tour.

The show spans venues across the world and comes a year after Teddy Swims released his second LP, “I’ve Tried Everything but Therapy (Part 2).” Additional concert dates were recently announced for 2027, “following the singer performing a huge run of live shows this summer, including festival slots at Bonnaroo, Coachella, Isle Of Wight Festival, Mad Cool and more,” said NME. (through April 2027)

Served just warm with nutty brown rice, garlicky yoghurt and rocket salad on the side, this dish makes a lovely vegetarian supper. It also works well with grilled or barbecued lamb, wrote the late Skye Gyngell in her bestselling book “A Year in My Kitchen”, which has just been reissued in a 20th anniversary edition.

Ingredients (serves 4-6)

• 1.5kg aubergines, trimmed
• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• olive oil, to shallow fry
• 50g unsalted butter
• 1kg ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped
• 4 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
• 400ml crème fraîche
• 2 tbsp tarragon leaves, finely chopped
• 2 tbsp chopped flatleaf parsley, plus extra to finish
• ½ tbsp chopped thyme leaves (ideally lemon thyme), plus sprigs to garnish
• 1 tbsp finely chopped chives
• 50g parmesan, freshly grated
• extra-virgin olive oil, to drizzle

Method

• Slice the aubergines into 1cm rounds. Lay in a colander and sprinkle generously with salt. Leave to degorge the juices for about 30mins – beads of moisture will appear on the flesh. Before cooking, pat each slice dry with kitchen paper.
• Heat a 1cm depth of olive oil in a large, fairly deep frying pan over a medium-high heat. Fry the aubergine slices, a few at a time, until golden brown on one side, then turn and brown on the other side. Remove and drain on kitchen paper.
• Melt the butter in another saucepan. Add the chopped tomatoes and garlic and season with a good pinch of salt and pepper. Cook over a low heat for about 15mins until the tomatoes are soft.
• Meanwhile, put the crème fraîche into a small pan and bring to the boil over a medium heat. Allow to bubble until reduced by a third, then take off the heat and add the tarragon, parsley, thyme and chives. Add half of the parmesan and taste for seasoning.
• Preheat the oven to 180°C. Line the bottom of a large, shallow ovenproof dish with a layer of aubergine slices. Follow with a thin coating of the tomato sauce and a sprinkling of parmesan. Continue layering, finishing with tomato sauce. Pour over the crème fraîche and sprinkle with the remaining parmesan. Leave to sit for a few minutes to allow the flavours to get acquainted.
• Place in the oven and bake for about 20-25mins until golden brown. Allow to stand for 5mins. Drizzle with a little extra-virgin olive oil and sprinkle with a pinch or two of salt. Scatter over some finely chopped parsley and thyme sprigs to garnish and serve... but not too hot!

Taken from A Year in My Kitchen by Skye Gyngell.

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“Launching an all-new coupé in 2026 is a brave move” given the dominance of SUVs, said Evo. But Honda isn’t expecting to sell a lot of these – 1,000 over the next two years, and it has few competitors.

The Prelude uses Honda’s “e:HEV powertrain” – a two-litre, four-cylinder petrol engine combined with twin electric motors, for an underwhelming 181bhp peak output and a 0-62mph time of 8.2 secs.

“A promising two-door coupé take on the hybrid sports car formula”, the Prelude strikes a “good balance between ride and handling”, said Auto Express. Sure, it lacks “gut-punching power”, but it’s well calibrated, with an “agile and responsive” chassis and plenty of grip.

The steering has decent weight; there’s a “sporty edge” to the acceleration. And the hybrid powertrain delivers “impressive efficiency” of 54.3mpg.

The Prelude will appeal to those who “love the sleek looks” of a sports car, but who don’t want to drive one, or sacrifice comfort, said The Telegraph. There’s just one model available, with high-spec advance trim and a “plush interior” with real leather upholstery.

The “snappy” touchscreen is simple to use and you get “proper buttons” too. But even children will feel cramped in the back, and the 284- litre boot is “pretty stingy”.

Europe’s art scene continues to be one of the richest and most diverse in the world. From Renaissance masterpieces, to innovative impressionism, the continent’s exhibitions have so much to offer this autumn. Explore some of the titans of industry in Dalí and Rembrandt, and discover lesser-known gems such as Mary Cassatt, for shows right up until April.

Willem de Kooning at Work

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Willem de Kooning (1904-97) was just 22 when he left Rotterdam for America. A stowaway on a freighter, he had no money and scarcely a word of English. Yet within 30 years, he was a titan of abstract expressionism. Marking the centenary of his departure, this exhibition explores one of the 20th century’s most revered painters.
9 October-17 January 2027

Bernini – Painter and Sculptor

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was arguably the ultimate Renaissance man. He painted, sculpted and even planned cities; and, as an architect, he arguably invented the baroque style. Vienna’s art history museum is mounting an unprecedented display of the artist’s masterpieces.
2 December-4 April 2027

Hals-Rembrandt

Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands

Two giants of Dutch art are united here for a surefire blockbuster. Hals was lively and irreverent; Rembrandt dealt with subjects altogether more weighty. A shared sensibility as painters, however, shines through their respective bodies of work.
6 November-28 February 2027

Mary Cassatt: Being Independent

Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France

The impressionist master Mary Cassatt finally gets the retrospective she deserves. Cassatt (1844-1926), who was born in America but worked in Paris, was every bit as inventive as her better-known male peers: her pictures of children are stupendous, less soppy than Renoir, more modern than Manet.
6 October-31 January 2027

The Freudian Universe of Dalí

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain

Surrealism was a movement inherently linked to Freudian psychoanalysis; this show features 62 works by Salvador Dalí, and explores his deeply odd beliefs from a therapist’s point of view. It will come as no surprise to learn there is a lot to unpick.
20 October-24 January 2027

Thanks to the smash hit success of “1536”, her “coruscating” play about three young women in Tudor England, the English writer Ava Pickett is flavour of the month, said Sarah Crompton on WhatsOnStage. Now, she has produced a new play – “Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy” – which is so powerful she might well prove to “be flavour of the year and of many years to come”. The drama, in which Helen (played with “high-wire intensity” by Michelle Dockery) is brought back to modern-day Essex after a civil war in England is “full of spit, fire and brilliance”. It’s like “Sarah Kane crossed with ‘The Only Way is Essex’ – devastatingly funny but utterly furious about the state of the world and the way that women within it are treated”.

Years ago, Helen left her husband Marcus (Menelaus) for a “foreigner”, prompting hordes of angry men to wreak havoc for a decade in her name, said Emma John in The Guardian. In a Towie-style home, her former close friend Cee, who is married to Marcus’s brother Mario (Agamemnon), hosts a tense event to mark her return – blood-spattered and still in shock. Given the recent scenes of masked men protesting in Dover and Portsmouth, Pickett’s dystopia feels “uncomfortably close, albeit infused with a Martin McDonagh-esque black wit”.

There are “tremendous” performances across the board, said Andrzej Lukowski on Time Out, and the pacey, emphatic direction from Lisa Spirling is “spot on”.

I was almost alone among critics in not taking to “1536”, said Clive Davis in The Times – and I didn’t much care for this play either. It’s “vivid”, and features “vivacious performances”. But its “erratic mix of myth and modern-day melodrama” leads from one “overwrought standoff to another” – while the characters “never come fully into focus”. It’s not a “perfect” play, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times, but it’s “bloody good”. It is true that the “bigger political picture remains peculiarly hazy for a country mired in civil war”. Even so, the “audacity of the narrative keeps you pinned to the action”. This is “bracing, provocative and scintillatingly written” drama, laced with “needle-sharp humour”.

stratfordeast.com Theatre Royal Stratford East, London E15. Until 10 October

“There’s no shortage of worthy films about D-Day,” said David Sexton in The New Statesman. To name just a few, there are “The Longest Day”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “Overlord”, “The Big Red One” – and, of course, we also have TV’s “Band of Brothers”. Yet “Pressure”, from the producers of “Darkest Hour” and based on a play by the actor and writer David Haig, “finds a niche not yet occupied”. Uniquely, the drama focuses on the days immediately before the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, and the “momentous” weather forecasts made by Scottish meteorologist James Stagg. Eisenhower had decided Operation Overlord should go ahead on 5 June. Stagg, however, became convinced the day would be stormy – bringing swell and poor visibility that would spell disaster. But on 4 June, Stagg forecast a calm interlude for 6 June. In Pressure, Stagg, played by Andrew Scott (“the film’s main attraction”) must persuade Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), the “irascible” General Bernard Montgomery (Damian Lewis), and Stagg’s US counterpart, Irving P. Krick (Chris Messina) to trust the data he has gathered, and delay the seaborne invasion by 24 hours.

“Dramatically speaking, this is all a bit more interesting in theory than in practice,” said Adam White in The Independent. The film is “largely confined to a series of identikit studies and war rooms”, and the eventual recreation of the landings sparks “unflattering comparisons to ‘Saving Private Ryan’, budget constraints on full display”. Thank goodness, then, for Scott, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times, in whose “every pained expression, we see the gravity of the situation – and an allergic inability to simply smile and nod”. His performance “really is superb”.

Not all castles are as they seem. Many have been transformed into hotels, where guests can live out their aristocratic dreams behind stone walls and high gates. These historic castles offer a stay you won’t experience anywhere else — plus the chance to be king or queen for the night.

Burghotel Auf Schonburg, Oberwesel, Germany

The moment you step inside this 1,000-year-old castle you can feel its storied history. There are 31 rooms and suites, each with its own design and antique furnishings, and several have balconies that look over the Rhine. Head to the interactive Tower Museum to learn more about how the castle defended itself against attacks, and stroll through the sprawling fairytale gardens for some quiet reflection.

Dalhousie Castle, Bonnyrigg, Scotland

For more than 800 years, Dalhousie Castle near Edinburgh has welcomed royalty, poets, politicians and now, you. This is the oldest inhabited castle in Scotland, complete with turrets, arched windows and red stone walls. In the Dungeon Restaurant, diners feast on contemporary Scottish cuisine, their tables surrounded by suits of armor and shields.

Dromoland Castle, Newmarket-on-Fergus, Ireland

Upon arrival, you’ll immediately notice Dromoland Castle’s “legendary” porters and doormen, who carry your bags to your room with “cheery smiles and lots of stories,” said Condé Nast Traveler. Their excellent service is just one perk of staying at the property.

You’ll also enjoy “castle-appropriate” activities like falconry walks and candle-lit dinners with “white glove service” at the Earl of Thomond restaurant, said Condé Nast Traveler. Take time to explore the “maze-like” main building, where architectural details include stained glass windows and carved ceilings.

Hever Castle, Edenbridge, England

Spend the night where Anne Boleyn spent her childhood. Her family moved to Hever Castle in the early 1500s, and this is where the doomed queen “received letters from Henry VIII,” said Time Out.

There are 26 rooms in the “beautiful” castle, which underwent a complete restoration in the early 20th century, courtesy of William Waldorf Astor. Even if you don’t have a “thing for the Tudors,” it’s “impossible not to be impressed” by the property and its “superb” gardens.

Ozu Castle, Ehime, Japan

This meticulously restored wooden castle is one of only a few still standing in Japan — and the first to welcome overnight guests. It’s believed that the original fortress went up in the 14th century, about 200 years before the Kato clan took control of Ozu.

There’s a focus on ensuring amenities and items like sheets and tableware are made locally and that guests are introduced to the area’s history. One way is through the 1617 Sadayasu Kato Takeover, a reenactment guests can participate in.

Pousada Castelo Estremoz, Portugal

Built in the 13th century by King Dinis I for Queen Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, Pousada Castelo Estremoz offers “sweeping views” of the Alentejo region, said Condé Nast Traveler. Rooms and suites come with “gorgeous” canopy beds, and outside there are “manicured” gardens, a swimming pool and a terrace perfect for meditation sessions. The palace sits in the historic center of Estremoz, known for its white marble quarries.

Apple TV’s “critically lauded” series of adaptations of Mick Herron’s books has returned for a sixth season, said Ed Power in The Telegraph, and has once again pulled “off the perfect balancing act between dark humour and misanthropic spycraft”.

As before, the disillusioned MI5 agent River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is stuck with the grumpy and flatulent “mastermind” Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) at Slough House – “a banishment room” in London for underperforming spies. Here, Cartwright and his colleagues do not live the lives of international mystery they once aspired to but are instead “condemned to a bureaucratic purgatory straight out of Samuel Beckett”.

The mood among the horses is, as ever, “decidedly gloomy”, said Ben Dowell in The Times. The rain beats down incessantly, Lamb’s personal habits have not improved, and poor Cartwright is grieving someone close to him. “Oh, and they keep getting bumped off.” A shadowy pair is hunting down individuals with links to Slough House and dispatching them with “deadly precision”. “It’s as brilliant as ever”, with “thrilling storytelling and some deftly applied comedy”. As always, everything is lifted whenever Oldman is on screen, “chomping crisps next to a dead body”.

It’s a very good batch of episodes, said Rebecca Cook in Metro, but it doesn’t “quite click”. The one-liners and “Lamb-isms” aren’t up to scratch and the best gags are all in the trailer. “Slow Horses” has “set itself an impeccable standard” – one that this series does not quite meet.

Anita Brookner was in her early 50s when she began writing fiction. She was a respected art critic, and unmarried. Anthony Blunt, her boss and mentor at the Courtauld Institute (where she was a lecturer), had just been exposed as a Soviet spy. “Reeling”, depressed and lonely, she found herself writing what would become “A Start in Life” (1981), said Lucy Atkins in The Guardian. It established a “process” that she stuck to religiously over the next two decades.

“Each novel took only three months from start to finish. She’d roam London forming sentences in her head, then simply write them down, at speed.” The novels sold well, and her fourth, “Hotel du Lac”, won the 1984 Booker Prize. But there was also much carping from male critics about how they were all about “sad spinsters” pining for love. (Private Eye called it “Hotel du Lac of Interest”.) Ten years on from Brookner’s death, aged 87, Hermione Lee has written an “astute and tireless” biography bringing this “intriguing, contradictory” figure to life.

Brookner was extraordinarily private, and did her best, as she put it, to “leave no trace”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. She destroyed all her private papers. With “heroic” scholarly devotion, Lee pieces her life together from the scraps of evidence that remain: her alienating upbringing, an only child in a large extended family of Polish-Jewish émigrés in south London; a few “intoxicating years” in post-war Paris; an unwanted return to London to care for her “increasingly demanding, ailing mother”. Lee scours Brookner’s “few appointment diaries” for liaisons with possible lovers – such as the art historian Michael Jaffé and the publisher Christopher MacLehose. And while the “narrative suffers in the second half”, with “dutiful summaries of Brookner’s 25 novels”, overall it displays the “rigour and authority” that made Lee’s previous lives – of Penelope Fitzgerald and Tom Stoppard, among others – so “indispensable”.

This is indeed a “tremendous” biography, full of striking details about Brookner’s quirks, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. (She often lied about her age, was a “slavish” fan of Philip Roth, and “never missed” “The Archers” or “The Bill”.) Lee describes her appearance brilliantly: “When she was young, she looked old and, when old, she became ageless.”

Lee’s portrait of this “recalcitrant” subject is “gripping and illuminating”, said Lucy Scholes in the Financial Times. “One likes to think that, while she might not have fully approved, Brookner would nevertheless admire the result.”

“I love summer as much as the next person, but I have to admit that, once the calendar gets to mid-August, I just cannot wait for autumn to arrive,” said Alessia Armenise in Condé Nast Traveller. As the weather cools down and the “back-to-school atmosphere is in full swing” the “long-awaited autumn activities can finally begin”.

The season for apple picking is about to hit its peak, with orchards all around the country opening their gates for people to fill their baskets. Here are some of our favourite places for a wholesome day out.

Ampleforth Abbey, Yorkshire

This is the “perfect place to spend a full autumn day out”, said Condé Nast Traveller. September and October are prime months for apple picking, with plenty of other activities to keep you entertained. The abbey has its own cider mill, and you can learn about the site’s history of making its own apple juice and cider. Once you have enough apples, “you can visit the abbey, explore the grounds and indulge in an afternoon tea”.
ampleforthabbey.org.uk

Brogdale Collections, Kent

This south east gem is known for its “diverse array of fruits, set in a stunning natural setting”, said Lauren Hughes in Country Living. Visitors can opt for guided tours which run until the end of October, allowing you to “explore the grounds and sample seasonal fruit”. Most importantly, the orchard also runs “Pick Your Own Fruit” weekends until 1 November, with both apples and pears available to get your fructose kick!
brogdalecollections.org

Hillfield Nursery, Norfolk

More than 250 varieties of apple are planted at Hillfield, “meaning the season starts early in the summer and finishes well into autumn”, said Rebecca Seal in National Geographic. The William Crump and Ellison’s Orange varieties are “rare”, and just two of many “real treasures among the trees”. Apple aficionados can also broaden their horizons, sinking their teeth into “plums, quince and medlars”, with the latter “a wonderful fruit that’s barely ever cultivated and looks like a cross between an apple and a rosehip”. They can be “picked hard, sour and unripe in autumn and then stored inside until they become aromatic and sweet” when they are usually used to make jam.
hillfieldnursery.co.uk

Hawarden Estate, Flintshire

Apples, pears and pumpkins are all up for grabs in this Welsh haven, said Siobhan Grogan in The Times. After filling your punnet, you can head to the estate’s onsite bakery for more sugary sustenance. In the afternoon, expand your range foraging for mushrooms in the grounds: after the three-hour guided woodland walk, you’ll know your “shaggy parasols from your chanterelles”. The estate is also home to an “18th-century castle where the four-time prime minister William Gladstone lived”, so plenty for history buffs too.
hawardenestateholidays.co.uk

Mersey Vale Nature Park, Manchester

Further north, there is “apple picking in abundance”, said Emmeline Banks in Secret Manchester. Mersey Vale Nature Park is a “wonderful destination any day of the week”: the city’s traditional community-run orchards sit next to “two ponds with dipping platforms” and a “wildflower meadow”. It is “more of an informal experience” here, with members of the public free to “wander through the trees, taking in what nature has to offer, and pick the tasty apples for themselves, free of charge”. There’s a real drive to use the nature reserve to “educate and support locals in eating healthily and understanding the importance of local produce”.
stockport.gov.uk/community-orchards

What happened

Ed Sheeran’s world tour unraveled Tuesday after all his remaining supporting acts quit in solidarity with the rapper Macklemore and his onstage support of Palestinians. Macklemore said Monday that he was dropped from the tour after New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft “rallied some of the other stadium owners” to give Sheeran an ultimatum: No Macklemore or no concert.

Who said what

Tuesday’s tour pullouts by Finneas, Danish band Lukas Graham and Irish acts Aaron Rowe and Beoga “put enormous pressure on Sheeran, who has tried to avoid politics and taking a side in the Gaza conflict,” The Associated Press said. “Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed,” Finneas, brother and collaborator of Billie Eilish, said on social media.

Kraft said Monday that Macklemore’s pro-Palestine statements at Sheeran’s recent New Jersey shows and “broader history of antisemitic rhetoric” crossed a line. Dropping Macklemore “was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine,” Sheeran wrote on Instagram. “I have my personal views on this devastating conflict,” but “I choose not to speak publicly” because concertgoers “do not expect a political forum.” That “doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

What next?

Sheeran has shows scheduled in North and South America through December. Most of the seven U.S. stadiums “are publicly owned,” CNN said. At least two recently had or will soon host concerts by Ye, “who made a spate of antisemitic comments that he now attributes to a brain injury and untreated bipolar disorder.”

The modern history of civilization provides ample, almost endless, inspiration for writers, who can draw on both well-known and obscure events to build dazzling narratives. From classic works to recent and more structurally daring standouts, historical fiction remains one of writing’s most popular forms.

‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens (1859)

Some classic works of literature from centuries ago were themselves works of historical fiction, perhaps none more beloved than Charles Dickens’ sprawling saga “A Tale of Two Cities.” Set against the backdrop of events prior to, during and after the French Revolution, it’s the story of Lucie Manette and her two suitors, the wealthy Frenchman Charles Darnay and the melancholy English lawyer Sydney Carton, who bear a physical resemblance to one another that serves the plot machinations at key moments. “Epic in historical scale, it is also an intimate book, showing how the personal and political intermingle and what the causes and effects of violence are,” said Anita Sethi at The Guardian.

‘Cities of Salt’ by Abdelrahman Munif (1984)

Abdelrahman Munif’s haunting novel traces the rapid transformation of an unnamed Gulf country into a petrostate starting in the 1930s. Set in an oasis called Wadi Al-Uyoun, its historical arc begins with the arrival of American surveyors and concludes with the transformation of Harran from a sleepy fishing port to a kind of Dubai, casting a critical eye on corruption and the ways that Gulf societies were warped by such a sudden change. This “timely and intelligent novel” brilliantly “captures the confusion and, in the end, the sadness wrought by sudden change, by greed and by two peoples who understand too little of each other,” said David Lamb at the Los Angeles Times.

‘Blood Meridian: or the Evening Redness in The West’ by Cormac McCarthy (1985)

The Kid is an illiterate 14-year-old runaway with a “taste for mindless violence” who gets swept up in the gruesome rampage of the Glanton gang, led by the hairless, philosophizing sociopath Judge Holden. “The Judge” dispenses wisdom like “moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak” as he commits unspeakable crimes.

The gang hunts members of the Apache tribe and sells their scalps at the behest of the Mexican government, and Cormac McCarthy’s unrelenting novel follows its members around Mexico and the American Southwest during the 1840s. This “extraordinary poetic novel” serves as an “exploration, at times explicitly philosophical, of the relationship between culture and violence,” said Andrew Hislop at the Times Literary Supplement.

‘Lonesome Dove’ by Larry McMurtry (1985)

Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is regarded as one of the finest novels of the American frontier. Augustus “Gus” McCrae and Woodrow Call are former rangers living in the titular border town in Texas when a former colleague, Jake Spoon, convinces them to pick up and move to the Montana Territory. Driving a herd of stolen cattle, the novel depicts their often violent and brutal journey from the Mexican border to Montana less as a heroic embodiment of the American spirit and more as a slow-moving tragedy. A “crushingly brutal” book, in McMurtry’s world “there’s also love and humor and heroism” in the air “despite the copious death,” said Nate Rogers at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel (2009)

Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” is the kind of sensation that pushed through the boundaries between literature and pop culture. The book is a fictionalized account of the erratic and emotional Henry VIII’s history-altering divorce and then marriage to Anne Boleyn, told through the eyes of the king’s adviser Thomas Cromwell.

The book follows this story for the critical eight years between 1527 and 1535, which led to the enduring schism that created the Church of England. An “expansive novel that unfolds in bits of gossip and dreamlike flashback,” this revisionist portrait of Thomas Cromwell “could forever alter him in the popular imagination,” said Macy Halford at The New Yorker.

‘The Luminaries’ by Eleanor Catton (2013)

Eleanor Catton’s “The Luminaries” burst onto the literary scene by making her the winner of the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction at the age of 28. Set in 1866 New Zealand, it follows Walter Moody, a gold prospector who meets twelve local notables convening in his hotel to discuss a series of strange events, from disappearances and murders to a cache of stolen gold, that have engulfed the town.

The events are recounted from each of the locals’ perspectives and at 832 pages, it remains the longest Booker Prize winner. It’s a novel that is “trying both to revive plot as a literary mode and to consider what a storyline looks like in our real, unplotted life, in which things reveal themselves to have a shape only in retrospect,” said B.D. McClay at The New Yorker.

‘The Underground Railroad’ by Colson Whitehead (2016)

Colson Whitehead blends both science fiction and history with “Underground Railroad,” which imagines the slavery-era patchwork of safe houses and escape routes as a literal underground railroad. Cora, the granddaughter of a woman kidnapped from West Africa and sold into slavery, flees her captor’s plantation, plunging her into the book’s alternate steampunk reality where she is pursued by the merciless slave catcher Ridgeway. It is “essential reading, forcing us to examine the chasms that we have willingly created and maintained in our attempts to wrestle with the gravity of atrocity and turn away from our own roles in mythologizing its content and consequences,” said The Book Habit.

‘Great Circle’ by Maggie Shipstead (2021)

Maggie Shipstead sets her novel in two timelines. In one, we follow the exploits of an aviator named Marian Graves, from her impoverished Montana childhood to her improbable career as a fearless pilot, which culminates in an attempt to circumnavigate the globe. The second follows Hadley Baxter, a troubled actress who has signed on to star in a biopic of Graves after her journal from the grand flight is found.

Shipstead’s electrifying novel spans decades and brings the period of early aviation to thrilling life, in the process touching on themes of women’s empowerment and struggle. A novel that “starts high and maintains altitude,” it “grasps for and ultimately reaches something extraordinary,” said Lynn Steger Strong at The New York Times.

‘Matrix’ by Lauren Groff (2021)

The best historical fiction gives readers a visceral sense of what it might have been like to be alive at different points in history, something Lauren Groff excels at with “Matrix.” In Groff’s imagining, the real figure of Marie de France is a gangly teenager exiled by her lover, Eleanor of Aquitaine, to oversee a dreary English abbey sometime during the 12th century.

Marie painstakingly builds the abbey into a regional power center to which notables must pay their respects. Loosely based on real-life figures and events, “Matrix” is a “highly distinctive novel of great vigor and boldness” that plunges readers into everything from “mystical visions that may or may not be divine, to the earthy business of abbey pigs, diseases and account books,” said Alexandra Harris at The Guardian.

It’s been over two decades since a “brown furry beast with purple prickles all over his back” made children’s book author Julia Donaldson a “household name”, said Laura Harding in The Independent. Now, she is back with a third instalment in her “witty and smart” Gruffalo series. “Gruffalo Granny” sees the Gruffalo and his daughter venture into the “deep dark wood” to source and prepare a special meal for grandma. Donaldson’s prose is as “pleasing as it ever was” and her long-time collaborator Axel Scheffler turns in some “incomparable” illustrations. “It was worth the wait.”

Donaldson is no one-beast wonder, though; she has written plenty of other enchanting children’s books. Here are our top picks.

Stick Man

This tale about a stick who is torn away from his family and must make an “Odyssean journey” home is “just about as epic as picture books get”, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. At one point, he approaches “what seems like certain death” – an “impressive” moment “in any story” but “doubly so” in a book for toddlers.

The Snail and the Whale

It’s “impossible” to separate Donaldson’s rhyming text about a tiny snail who hitches a ride on the tail of a whale from Scheffler’s incredible pictures, said Heritage in The Guardian. “Quite frankly, the whole thing reads like a love letter between them.” It’s one of their “very best” collaborations.

The Highway Rat

A “greedy rat” rides along the highway, terrorising other animals and stealing their food in this “swaggeringly illustrated” book, said Marianne Levy in The i Paper. “Nuts, milk, clover – nothing is safe from his dastardly paws”. That is, until he crosses paths with a “devious duck who lures him into an echoing trap”. Donaldson herself has said this gallopingly rhythmic tale is one of her favourites.

The Paper Dolls

No Scheffler artwork on this one but Rebecca Cobb’s “gentle illustrations” are the perfect accompaniment for this “exquisitely subtle” story, said Levy in The i Paper. A chain of paper dolls “dance through the house and garden, singing”, until a boy “snips them into confetti”. He thinks they’re “gone for ever” but he’s wrong: the dolls “have flown into the little girl’s memory”, where they dance on. “Are you crying yet?”

The Gruffalo

Our list would, of course, not be complete without mentioning “The Gruffalo”. Published in 1999, it quickly became a “publishing phenomenon”, said Sophie Knight in Closer. The “simplicity” of the tale about a “clever mouse escaping the clutches” of other animals by inventing a terrifying monster, combined with Scheffler’s “wonderful” pictures, have kept it a “firm family favourite” ever since.

Over a year after courting controversy with an American Eagle ad, actor Sydney Sweeney is facing another firestorm for a racy campaign in which she appears in various states of undress. Posing for the sports trading app Novig, Sweeney has stirred a debate regarding oversexualization in the world of advertising.

A ‘kick in the face’

Despite not wanting to “give this any more attention,” Australian Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus posted on Instagram that she could not “keep” her “mouth shut” upon seeing the ad, per the Sydney Morning Herald. Sweeney’s ad is not only a “kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft” but also to every woman who enjoys sports for what it really is: “teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity,” Titmus wrote. How do we live in a world where “monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport is still a thing?”

The criticism isn’t about “being jealous or insecure,” it is about this already being a “male-dominated field” where women are “constantly having to prove why we belong,” Marissa Womack, the manager of game day promotions and programming for the minor league baseball team the Harrisburg Senators, said in a TikTok video, per The Hollywood Reporter. The backlash against Sweeney is coming in defense of “having passions and joy working in this industry” since when the “only representation is sexualization,” you see “less and less young women wanting to pursue this!”

The controversy is about “more than one advertisement,” Vivienne Lewis, a clinical psychologist, said at The Conversation. It “raises a bigger issue” about the “attention we give to what women look like” rather than “who they are and what they can do.” Body image includes “our thoughts, feelings and attitudes toward our bodies” and how much “importance we place on appearance when valuing ourselves.” Sports provide a “wonderful opportunity to shift that focus.” This is why the “discussion goes beyond Sweeney” or elite athletes. It isn’t about “criticizing Sweeney’s body or telling women what they should wear.” The more useful question is “why we give appearance so much importance in the first place.”

‘Hardly an unusual strategy’

Not to be a “crazed optimist,” said Marina Hyde at The Guardian, but the great thing about where women’s sport is today is that it “feels a whole lot bigger and stronger and more compelling” than whether Sweeney “did or didn’t get her tits out for a gambling ad.” It would have been “cooler for women’s sport” to simply “not even mention the naked gambling ad at all.” If it felt it had to, maybe “focus on the gambling bit rather than the woman advertising it.” Instinct says “gambling wrecks a lot more lives than Sydney Sweeney.”

We all know “exactly what Sydney Sweeney was doing,” advertising copywriter Paul Burke said at The Spectator. She was “selling a sports betting app.” She did not “pretend that she was an elite athlete.” Neither did she “decry the great talent, strength and sacrifice involved in becoming one.” Athletes “weren’t even mentioned.”

Novig’s decision to cast Sydney Sweeney was a “savvy one,” Burke said. Her “sultry and provocative performance,” building on last year’s “denim-based outrage,” was bound to “appeal to the people most likely to download this app.” This is “hardly an unusual strategy.” To “rage against beautiful people in adverts” is as pointless as “raging against athletic people in the 400 meter hurdles.” As far as Sweeney is concerned, the “voluble minority” who told the world how much they hated the ad “played right into her hands.” The “power of smart, cynical advertising” and a “certain brand of female empowerment” have once again “emerged victorious.”

Eastlake

The Queen of the Lake floats on Lake Union, with a three-sided moorage and city views. Built in 1980, the refreshed contemporary four-bedroom has a fireplace, hardwood floors, 22-foot ceilings, and an open chef’s kitchen with glossy stone counters.

Outdoor spaces include a Juliet balcony; a covered, heated deck with a hot tub; a floating dock; two decks off the dining room and kitchen; and spiral stairs to a roof terrace. $4,799,000. Dan Gottesman, Engel & Völkers Mercer Island, (206) 898-2505

Magnolia

One of the final designs of architect Ralph Anderson, this 2000 four-bedroom contemporary looks out to Puget Sound, Bainbridge Island, and the Olympic Mountains.

The main living space has vaulted ceilings with exposed beams, oak floors, a kitchen with a Viking range and an in-island beverage fridge, and retractable glass doors that open to a wraparound deck. An elevator connects the floors, and a stone patio faces the water. $3,895,000. Junior Torres, J.D., Windermere Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (206) 854-5596

Mount Baker

This 1911 Spanish-style home designed by architect James H. Schack has views of Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains. The five-bedroom features hardwood floors, original mahogany millwork, a sunroom, a dining room with French doors inlaid with arches, an eat-in kitchen, and a lower level with a gym, billiards, and a fireplace.

The nearly half-acre lot includes a deck with a hot tub and a patio above the attached garage. $4,495,000. Mark Potvin, Compass, (206) 890-4615

Broadmoor

Updated in 1970, this mid-century modern three-bedroom is a few minutes from the water and surrounded by a park.

The foyer features terrazzo floors and roofline windows, and opens to a main space with wood ceilings and floors, a clean-lined kitchen, a dining area with a wet bar, and a living room with floor-to-ceiling windows and a fireplace. Glass doors connect to a deck, a patio, and a flat yard. $4,900,000. Laura Halliday, Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty, (206) 399-5842

Capitol Hill

Built in 1906 as the First Church of Christ, Scientist, The Sanctuary was converted in 2011 into 12 apartments, including this three-story, three-bedroom unit with private gated entry.

The home retains historic columns, stained glass, and exposed brick and limestone walls, along with newer steel beams, posts, and a fireplace. There’s also a loft with a glass railing, a modern kitchen, and an in-unit elevator. Green spaces and coffee shops are nearby. $1,995,000. Moira Holley, Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty, (206) 612-5771

West Queen Anne

This two-story, one-bedroom condo is in the former West Queen Anne School, a Richardsonian Romanesque building completed in 1920. The apartment has high ceilings, hardwood floors, Palladian windows, beadboard wainscoting, and a spiral staircase to a loft bedroom with exposed brick walls. The C-shaped kitchen has herringbone wall tiles and stainless appliances.

Shared amenities include access to the leafy campus, a gym, parking, and storage, and the Space Needle is 10 minutes away. $499,000. Keith Reed, Windermere Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International, (253) 223-3436

‘So Much for Goodbyes’ by Billy Strings

★★★

Consider the latest from Billy Strings “an instant addition to the canon of great Americana albums born from personal upheaval,” said Eric Renner Brown in Billboard. The virtuosic bluegrass guitarist, whose “lightning-quick” picking and psychedelic improvisations have won him a devoted following, has thus far been underrated as a songwriter. “But expect that to change with his emotional fifth album,” a record born of heartbreak following the 2025 overdose death of his mother. While “Burn the Other End,” the first single, “bottles the fire and brimstone of Strings’ live shows,” the album’s true standout, the somber “Still I Crash,” is “as intimate a song as Strings has ever recorded.” Arriving halfway in, that tune “effectively punches the listener in the stomach” and “casts a long shadow over the remaining tracks,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Up until then, the 33-year-old three-time Grammy winner has mixed in a Springsteen-like piece of heartland rock and a couple songs “so rooted in tradition” they could be 80 years old. When a sorrowful waltz ends things, you’ll be buoyed by one thought: “how rich and powerful the album you’ve just heard is.”

‘I Must Be Dreaming’ by Alabama Shakes

★★★

When Alabama Shakes scored a No. 1 album with 2015’s Sound & Color, “it seemed like the start of something big,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. Instead, the “soulful roots-rock outfit” stopped touring in 2017, chief songwriter Brittany Howard dove into solo projects, and we’ve all waited 11 years for a follow-up to the band’s Grammy-winning sophomore effort. Finally, though, Howard has reunited with guitarist Heath Fogg and bassist Zac Cockrell, delivering a record that “represents an evolution of the band’s sound while clarifying why it stood out from the retro-rock horde in the first place,” starting with Howard’s remarkable voice. I Must Be Dreaming “is, among other things, a grown-up record,” said Jonathan Bernstein in Rolling Stone. “There are songs about wistful regret, songs about the state of the country, songs about, well, gardens.” Highlights include the piano-driven shuffle “Waist Deep” and the genre-blending centerpiece, “I Feel Hope Coming.” Howard “hasn’t sounded this at home in years,” proof that her old band “remains one of the most effective ways of communicating the rock-soul-funk-pop she hears inside her head.”

★★★

“The stage version of Paranormal Activity delivers more thrills, chills, and screams than Broadway has seen in years,” said Frank Rizzo in Variety. Horror rarely succeeds on New York City’s biggest stages, but this show works because its story is built around two appealing characters, their fear that their home may be haunted proves justified, and the whole experience is sold by “hair-raising” illusions provided by the same man who created the Tony-winning supernatural effects for the current stage adaptation of Stranger Things. Though the story doesn’t match the plot of any of the Paranormal Activity movies, it produces “an exhilarating fun-house night in the theater.”

The show, which debuted in the U.K. and has toured widely, arrives on Broadway “polished to a cold shine,” said Helen Shaw in The New York Times. Wisely, it jettisons the movies’ signature use of found video footage as a source of frights, leaning instead on “pre-cinematic scare techniques like an abruptly loud doorbell and a hypnotic sequence of storytelling in the dark.” Cast as an affectionate young couple who’ve newly relocated, Cher Álvarez and Travis A. Knight “carry the whole thing with an unaffected naturalism” as they fight to shake off the suspicion that a supernatural force has followed them to their new home. Sure, “the story wobbles if you think about it after the lights come up—so don’t think about it too much.”

It may seem odd that the audience routinely applauds after each big scare, said Jackson McHenry in NYMag.com. Yet the scares are “indeed applause-worthy.” I could complain that playwright Levi Holloway’s attempts to add thematic heft to the story “grow tedious quickly” and that the show’s grisly horror-movie-style ending lands awkwardly in a live theater setting. Until then, though, sharing the company of a thousand strangers while watching the home’s haunting play out “gives the thing an odd and interesting warmth.”

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.

British historian Dan Jones is the author of The New York Times nonfiction best sellers The Plantagenets and Powers and Thrones. Lion Hearts, the third novel in his Essex Dogs trilogy, a thriller series set in 14th-century France and England, is now in paperback.

‘American Tabloid’ by James Ellroy (1995)

Often described as a crime writer, Ellroy is to my mind one of the greatest living writers of historical fiction. American Tabloid is part of his Underworld USA Trilogy, alongside The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover, and it’s a grotesque vision of the events surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It’s biting, fevered, slangy, and ugly. Buy it here.

‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy (1869)

Tolstoy’s epic about Russia during the Napoleonic Wars is one of the greatest studies of human psyche and society ever written. Tolstoy saw everything and had the grandeur of vision to be able to render it in one totally absorbing novel. Buy it here.

‘Life Photographers’ edited by John Loengard (1998)

While working with the artist Marina Amaral on three books about the history of photography, this was my bible. The great Life magazine photographers—Alfred Eisenstaedt, Robert Capa, and all—were pioneering, fearless, and often weird. John Loengard’s oral interviews tell their story. Buy it here.

‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot (1871)

Eliot was the English Tolstoy, with a vicious sting in her tail. I listened to this on audiobook, and its one-liners are so savage that I would have to pull the car over to write them down. Eliot blows Dickens and Austen out of the park. This is a majestic and hilarious book. Buy it here.

‘A Handful of Dust’ by Evelyn Waugh (1934)

When my daughter was assigned this novel in school, I read it so that the two of us could discuss it on long drives. Whoa, baby! Waugh on his turn from satirical humorist to dark inquisitor of the human condition is in full effect here. Is the morality fable at the end an allegory of purgatory or hell? My daughter and I are still debating that. Buy it here.

‘On Boxing’ by Joyce Carol Oates (1987)

I wrote a sports column for the London Evening Standard for a decade and it gave me great respect for anyone who can write well about that over-examined subject. Oates is up there as perhaps the greatest boxing writer who ever leveled her gaze at the square circle. Buy it here.

‘The Life of M’ by Rachel Cusk

“I have disappointing news,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Rachel Cusk’s 11th novel, which has widely been rumored to be a dirt-dishing character assassination of a particular A-lister she’s been friendly with, “isn’t really about Natalie Portman at all.” Granted, the book concerns an actress, identified only as M, whose screen credits, including a breakthrough performance at 13, track with Portman’s. But the novel makes its intentions clear in its opening lines, when the narrator reports having confessed an interest in writing M’s autobiography and M asking if the story would be entirely made up. Cusk, who’s celebrated for forays into autofiction that interrogate the novel as a form, is plainly about to construct “a narrative hall of mirrors that only a fool would confuse with a thinly veiled roman à clef about a celebrity.”

“Like most of Cusk’s recent work, Life of M is mainly plotless,” said Emma Alpern in NYMag.com. We see little that happens in M’s life beyond her moving through her days unable to muster any strong feelings or connect to reality as most people experience it. Meanwhile, the narrator neither recedes nor reveals any substantial personal information. Though “there’s a mesmerizing, out-of-time quality to the whole scenario,” Cusk arguably goes too far here in her bid to dismantle fiction’s presumptions, because “her insistence on vagueness can be tedious.” The result is “Cusk’s weakest novel yet,” said Becca Rothfeld in The New Yorker. “Life of M is not a disciplined dismantling; it’s a machine breaking down at random.” Cusk wants to make the point that individual experiences don’t matter anymore because we all succumb to a form of groupthink, then reveals her towering self-regard by endowing every one of her characters with the same “humorless, cosmopolitan, self-important” voice that’s undoubtedly her own.

“Life of M is a strange book,” said Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic. “But in its final pages, it performs an astonishing rug pull that makes you wonder whether the book actually has been an autobiography all along, interested in exposing not M but the knotty and unpalatable process of Cusk’s art.” Throughout her career, Cusk has drawn fire, and even been sued, for creating unflattering portraits of recognizable people she has known. Her narrator here admits late in the book that she imagined her way into M’s mind to entertain herself. “To be a writer in this way is to be parasitic—to latch onto someone real and to try to draw out their life force to make art. It isn’t exactly defensible, but for Cusk to expose that practice is deeply fascinating.”

‘Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature’ by Emily Wilson

“You don’t have to be particularly interested in ancient literature to enjoy this book,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. “By the time you finish it,” though, “you probably will be.” In this collection of “wonderfully spirited” essays about great works of the past, Emily Wilson, a classicist best known for her 2017 translation of The Odyssey, is up-front about how every translation contains an element of betrayal. Each word or phrase chosen requires a departure from the original, and attempts at literal exactness generate stiff language. Wilson believes it’s important to capture the feel of a text—its sound, pacing, and even humor. As she weaves together close readings of classic texts with arguments about the larger issues at stake in those texts, “Wilson’s excitement for her subject is irrepressibly moving.”

When Wilson finds fault with a translator, she’s “tough-minded,” even “scathing,” said Blake Morrison in The Guardian. She calls out poet Robert Browning for indecipherable translations and American classics popularizer Edith Hamilton for racism, and she decries all classicists who snobbishly try to bar entry to their domain. “Gatekeeping isn’t Wilson’s style,” and she’s eager to end her field’s use of Latin and Greek to keep out the plebs. She also loves to point out how much overlap exists between the ancient world and our own, finding parallels that link Aeschylus, Demosthenes, and Aristophanes with the likes of Spike Lee and Erica Jong. And she slams Silicon Valley’s tech lords for embracing a version of stoicism that misses the essentials.

Though Wilson went viral earlier this summer with a biting critique she published about the hit screen adaptation of The Odyssey, said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe, she champions nuanced critical writing. In this book, said Harvey Freedenberg in Shelf Awareness, the role of critic affords her a chance to unspool “a stimulating tour of Greek and Roman literature.” An essay on Sappho explores female sexuality; elsewhere, we learn about Roman humor and slavery in the ancient world. “Anyone who’s been exposed to Wilson’s work will learn much from these essays.” They’ll also “hope her journey as a trusted guide through this distant world continues.”

It’s not surprising that a trip to the Galapagos Islands “tops many travellers’ wish lists”, said The Times. The “far-flung Ecuadorian archipelago” is home to “astonishing landscapes” and an array of rare wildlife from blue-footed boobies to marine iguanas and giant tortoises.

It is best navigated by a small ship, all of which are “strictly regulated” in order to protect the “pristine natural area known to have inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution”. These vessels are limited to a maximum of 100 guests, and travel with “resident naturalists” to share fascinating insights about the surroundings.

We took an early morning flight from Quito to Baltra Island in the centre of the archipelago before boarding the National Geographic Islander III, said Marc Shoffman in The Independent. With just 48 guests it’s an intimate boat: you won’t find any waterslides or ice cream shops, but my daughters were happy “snorkelling among the turtles, parrot fish and manta rays in the unseasonably warm waters”.

There are “a few rules” to follow. Guests must travel in groups of up to 16 and be accompanied by an expert guide to “keep crowds down”. You can’t take anything home with you, however tempting, and you must always stand six feet away from the wildlife. The reward is how close you can get to the incredible creatures that seem “unbothered” by human presence.

It’s worth getting up early to avoid the heat and “capture the wildlife at its calmest”. On South Plaza Island we were greeted by “sleepy sea lions and the region’s unique swallow-tailed gulls”, and on Las Bachas “rare birds such as the red-footed booby and shiny white Nazca boobies simply waddled by”. The best moment, though, was watching the “famous giant tortoises as they calmly ate grass at the Rancho El Manzanillo, unfazed by our gawping”.

If you love the water, Celebrity Cruises is a good option, said The Telegraph. During the seven-night itineraries guests have plenty of opportunities to “splash around with the archipelago’s diverse and diverting marine wildlife”. Snorkelling sessions are a great way to get close to sea turtles, reef sharks and, if you’re lucky, the “darting, bullet-like form of a Galapagos penguin”.

Or if birdwatching is more up your alley, try one of Silversea’s luxury expeditions exploring the Outer Loop. The first stop is Genovesa, dubbed Bird Island for its incredible variety of avian life including the “hard-to-spot short-eared owl” and magnificent red-throated frigatebirds.

The best psychological thrillers use their characters’ paranoia and uncertainty to create similar feelings of dread and doubt in their viewers. These nine classics skillfully keep audiences guessing while depicting different kinds of waking nightmares, making the protagonists’ traumas our own for a few entertaining hours.

‘Rear Window’ (1954)

Endlessly imitated but rarely, if ever, equaled, director Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” stars James “Jimmy” Stewart as Jeff, a photographer laid up with a broken leg trying to pass the time people-watching from his window during a stifling New York City summer. One night after hearing a woman scream and the sound of breaking glass, Jeff notices his neighbor, Lars Thorwald, behaving strangely.

When Thorwald’s wife is nowhere to be seen the next day, Jeff is convinced that Thorwald murdered and dismembered her. Jeff enlists his nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), and his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), to help confirm his suspicions. “Witty, suspenseful, sad, funny and wise,” it is “at once accessible to a mass audience and deep enough to be worth dozens of reviewings and critical analyses,” said Kim Newman at Empire. (Prime Video)

‘Vertigo’ (1958)

Possibly the best-known and beloved of director Alfred Hitchcock’s library of psychological thrillers, “Vertigo” is both a literal rendering of the main character’s syndrome as well as a description of what you feel as you watch the film. Jimmy Stewart plays Scottie Ferguson, a retired detective with a well-earned fear of heights, who is hired by Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to surveil Elster’s wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who Ferguson instead falls for.

After she jumps to her death in front of him, Scottie sees a woman who looks just like her, making him question his sanity and reality itself. A “strange, drifty, hallucinatory romance,” it “keeps “bringing us back to the same places, turning us in relentlessly on ourselves,” said Terrence Rafferty at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (1990)

Tim Robbins is Jacob Singer, a Vietnam veteran and postal worker who lives with his girlfriend, Jezzie (Elizabeth Peña), in mid-1970s New York City. When he begins to experience hallucinations and seemingly unexplainable phenomena (like being told by his VA clinic that they have no record of him being a patient), he comes to believe that a haunting memory from the war might help explain the strange things occurring around him.

This disturbing film was prescient in its deployment of trauma as a plot device in psychological thrillers as well as a unique entry in the anti-war canon. Director Adrian Lyne’s movie “enters into the hallucinations of a desperate mind and lives there,” while it “evokes a paranoid-schizophrenic state as effectively as any film I have ever seen,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (Paramount+)

‘Open Your Eyes’ (1997)

Memory, or the absence thereof, plays a prominent role in so many of the most effective psychological thrillers, including director Alejandro Amenábar’s “Open Your Eyes,” which was remade in the U.S. as “Vanilla Sky.” After he meets Sofía (Penélope Cruz in her breakout role) at a party, César (Eduardo Noriega) is disfigured in a car crash that kills his ex-girlfriend, Nuria (Najwa Nimri).

Sofía can’t bear to see him, and during one evening of self-medication, he awakes into what appears to be a different reality, with his good looks restored and an adoring Sofía at his side. Which reality is the real one? This is an “ambitiously complex, disturbing and terrific-looking thriller” whose “nightmarish, demanding plot giddily leaps from past to present, from fantasy to reality and back again,” said Jonathan Holland at Variety. (HBO Max)

‘Memento’ (2000)

The twisty, mind-bending hit that began director Christopher Nolan’s journey to Hollywood royalty, “Memento” stars Guy Pearce as Leonard, a man whose difficulty forming new memories means that he has to scribble notes on his skin and mirrors. While looking for his wife’s killer, he gets involved with Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), a bartender who may be helping or manipulating him. Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) is a cop with his own agenda.

Told in reverse chronological order, “Memento” is more than its central gimmick. Nolan’s “neo-noir puzzle box plays like one of the key artworks of the 21st century, predicting an era where reality is more a personal, selective construct of comforting biases than a widely agreed-upon set of facts,” said Scott Tobias at The Guardian. (Netflix)

‘Mulholland Drive’ (2001)

Director David Lynch’s audacious, trippy classic is like two movies in one. You think you’re watching a dreamlike story about an aspiring actress named Betty (Naomi Watts), who helps and falls in love with Rita (Laura Harring) after a car wreck leaves her with amnesia.

But the plot loops and falls in on itself, rendering the dreamlike first half open to interpretation, and leaving viewers to sort through its many possible explanations. A film that offers “certain truths about the grotesque desires at the heart of the American project,” it simultaneously asks viewers to “interrogate ourselves, again and again, in search of some kind of absolution,” said Suzanne Enzerink at the Los Angeles Review of Books. (Prime Video)

‘Caché’ (2005)

Anne and Georges Laurent (Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil) are comfortable Parisians who begin receiving videotapes of the house they share with their teenage son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), being surveilled. Then more arrive, with increasing menace, turning husband and wife against one another and leading to inevitable revelations, both about an incident from Georges’ childhood as well as France’ brutal colonial past. Renowned director Michael Haneke brilliantly “transforms the viewer into both the author and the participant” in its central mystery and the film stands as an “astounding unification of form and content,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (Prime Video)

‘Black Swan’ (2010)

Natalie Portman is Nina Sayers, an obsessively dedicated ballerina who wins the role as the lead in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake for the New York City Ballet after the aging Beth (Winona Ryder) is forced into retirement. But she faces a new rival in the mysterious Lily (Mila Kunis), who triggers hallucinations, jealousy and desire in Nina.

Director Darren Aronofsky’s chilly mind-bender is mesmerizing, terrifying and perplexing in equal measure. A “witchy brew of madness and cunning,” it moves deftly between being “deadly serious, downright goofy and by turns shocking, funny and touching,” said Manohla Dargis at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘Watcher’ (2022)

In this slow burn, Maika Monroe is Julia, a young woman struggling to figure out what to do with herself when she moves with her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), to the Romanian capital of Bucharest, where there is a serial killer on the loose. Convinced that a neighbor is stalking her, she tries in vain to convince Francis, and the police, that she is in danger.

Director Chloe Okuno builds an atmosphere of dread, keeps the audience guessing and subtly underlines the film’s message about gaslighting and misogyny. It makes viewers “just as anxious as Julia, staring into the faces of every man that walks by,” and stands as “one of the best thrillers of this style to come out in decades,” said Stephen Rosenberg at Horror Geek Life. (AMC+)

The “real preserving season” begins now at the “deep, sticky end of summer”, said Itamar Srulovich in The Guardian. “In fact, September may well be the best jam month of all.”

As the weather starts to cool there is plenty of produce to turn into jars of the sweet spread. Plums offer “near endless possibilities” and some varieties can “take a surprising amount of spice”, while figs’ “honeyed sweetness” matches up perfectly with a “few pods of cooling cardamom for balance”. It’s well worth “sweating over” pots of fig jam in late summer, so that there’s a “little bit of jarred sunshine” ready and waiting for the dark, cold winter months.

Things are a bit trickier when it comes to grapes. They must be chosen carefully as most of the sweet commercial fruits lack the “funk” and “acidity” needed for a good jam. The fragola variety, with its “intoxicating, wild strawberry flavour”, is a “rare treat”.

Making jam has an “undeniable romance”, said Jane Black in The Wall Street Journal. Just three ingredients are needed: fruit, sugar and lemon juice. Heat them over the stove, and they become “summer in a jar”. “It’s true alchemy.”

It might sound simple, but perfecting the texture and consistency of homemade jam can be surprisingly difficult. Jam-making business owner Daniel Perry suggests using a copper jam pan which “conducts heat extraordinarily well”, and making jam in small batches to ensure the fruit on the bottom doesn’t burn. It’s also worth macerating the fruits in sugar and lemon juice the night before to help “extract juice” before you move on to the cooking.

For a “well-rounded”, gently spiced blackberry and apple jam, try Elspeth Biltoft’s recipe in Stylist. The founder of Rosebud Preserves uses golden granulated sugar in her jams, only cooks with seasonal fruits that are “fresh, firm and slightly underripe” and carefully labels every jar with the date and tasting notes so you can improve your recipe each year.

Istanbul is a city that seamlessly blends old and new. One moment you’re standing beneath the soaring domes of an Ottoman mosque, the next sipping cocktails overlooking one of the world’s busiest waterways as sleek ferries weave between Europe and Asia. Few hotels capture the contrast better than The Ritz-Carlton Istanbul. Named the city’s best hotel in the 2026 Travel + Leisure World’s Best Awards and ranked sixth in Europe, it occupies prestigious Süzer Plaza in the elegant Dolmabahçe district, away from the busiest tourist streets yet within an easy walk of Taksim Square and Dolmabahçe Palace.

With 239 rooms and suites, Turkey’s only Nobu restaurant, four further dining venues, a rooftop terrace with infinity pool and an extensive subterranean spa, it makes an ideal base for exploring one of the world’s most intoxicating cities.

Why stay here?

After a day negotiating Istanbul’s energetic streets, the rooms feel wonderfully restorative. Our partial Bosphorus view room is flooded with light thanks to lofty ceilings and large windows framing water, woodland and the city skyline. Soft neutral tones are lifted by a curved leather-and-wood headboard, striking blue wall art inspired by traditional Turkish textiles and elegant pendant lighting that gives the room warmth rather than hotel uniformity.

In the bathroom, white Turkish Afyon marble is paired with hand-painted Iznik tiles, tulip motifs and a handsome dark-wood vanity. A deep soaking tub, walk-in rainfall shower and Diptyque Philosykos toiletries invite an unhurried bathing ritual before dinner.

Guests looking to splurge can book the 120 sq metres Ritz-Carlton Suite, complete with dining room, whirlpool bath and panoramic Bosphorus views, or the Nobu Suite that combines Japanese minimalism with Turkish craftsmanship and features a private terrace with an onsen tub overlooking the water.

There’s much to tempt beyond the bedroom too. Descend to the hotel’s expansive spa where you’ll find a traditional hammam, treatment rooms, indoor pool and fitness facilities, or make straight for The Roof, where Istanbul unfolds beneath you. By day, guests recline on chunky loungers beneath towering palms and oversized parasols and cool off in the petite infinity pool; by evening, the atmosphere shifts as DJs take to the decks. Yoga classes and open-air cinema nights are also held in this appealing rooftop space.

Eating and drinking

The Roof is the perfect place to begin the evening. As the sun dips behind the skyline, cocktails arrive. My Lychee Tax – a deliciously fruity blend of strawberry rum and lychee purée – slipped down quickly.

The Ritz-Carlton is home to Turkey’s first Nobu, still one of Istanbul’s hardest restaurant reservations to secure. The celebrated Japanese-Peruvian menu delivers all the signatures that have made the brand famous worldwide. We began with buttery toro with yuzu and pulled beef tacos scented with truffle before moving on to Nobu’s legendary black cod, which lived up to its reputation, and perfectly steamed turbot bursting with clean, delicate flavours. Every mouthful was a surprise.

Breakfast and dinner are served at Atölye, a light-filled dining room delivering sweeping Bosphorus views. The menu celebrates modern Anatolian cuisine using regional ingredients and traditional recipes with a contemporary twist. Smoky aubergine atom, reminiscent of an elevated babaganoush, and black cabbage stuffed with walnuts and roasted peppers made memorable starters before beautifully cooked shrimp arrived alongside hibeş, a rich, spicy tahini dip. Exceptionally tender lamb Küşleme was served with crisp aubergine chips, and dessert took the form of an ingenious fig-shaped pudding that concealed flowing fig jelly beneath a white chocolate shell. Watching darkness settle over the Bosphorus as dinner unfolded made the experience all the more memorable, helped by attentive but discreet service.

For something altogether different, Limoré brings Italy to Istanbul. Bright, contemporary interiors provide the backdrop for handmade pasta, excellent pizzas and generous Italian classics. Bucatini cacio e pepe would satisfy even discerning Romans, and truffle risotto, osso buco and sole mugnaia round off a dinner that tasted just like nonna made it.

Things to do

One of Istanbul's greatest pleasures is discovering how effortlessly the city layers empires, religions and cultures. Although traffic is often gridlocked, the efficient tram network makes many of the major sights surprisingly easy to reach.

Begin at the Grand Bazaar, where more than 4,000 shops are packed in a labyrinth of vaulted passageways that have bustled with traders for over 500 years. Amid the calls of merchants selling spices, carpets, jewellery and ceramics, we stocked up on fragrant Turkish delight before wandering towards Sultanahmet, home to two of the city’s greatest architectural treasures.

The sixth-century Hagia Sophia remains one of the world’s most extraordinary buildings. Originally a Byzantine cathedral before becoming an Ottoman mosque and now an active place of worship once more, its vast marble interior, soaring dome and shimmering gold mosaics still inspire awe nearly 1,500 years after it was built. Just across the square, the Blue Mosque is equally magnificent. Its six slender minarets dominate the skyline, while inside more than 20,000 hand-painted blue Iznik tiles decorate the cascading domes. Between prayer times, visitors quietly share the space with worshippers, who gather at the fountains outside for ritual ablutions before entering.

For a change of pace, head to Balat, one of Istanbul’s most characterful neighbourhoods. Its steep cobbled streets are lined with brightly painted Ottoman houses, art galleries, vintage boutiques and second-hand bookshops, offering a more bohemian feel than the grand monuments of the historic peninsula. We paused at the delightfully quirky Velvet Café for cappuccino and a superb serving of rich Kaymaklı un helvası before visiting the remarkable Bulgarian Church of St Stephen, whose prefabricated cast-iron construction and dazzling gilded interior make it unlike any other church in the city.

Back near the hotel, Taksim Square marks the heart of modern Istanbul. From here, lively Istiklal Street threads through elegant 19th-century buildings housing international brands, cafés and historic landmarks including the Church of St Anthony of Padua. Don’t miss the compact but excellent Pera Museum, home to celebrated Orientalist paintings, Turkish ceramics and a café centred around a piano once owned by Maria Callas. Afterwards, head back through leafy Cihangir, where independent coffee shops, vintage stores and Istanbul’s famously pampered street cats provide a reminder that some of the city’s greatest pleasures are found on a quiet wander.

The verdict

Superbly located between historic and modern Istanbul, The Ritz-Carlton delivers polished service without pretension. Add beautifully appointed rooms, Bosphorus views, Turkey’s first Nobu, an excellent spa and one of the city’s finest rooftops, and it’s easy to see why it ranks among Europe’s most celebrated luxury hotels.

Vicki was a guest of The Ritz-Carlton Istanbul; ritzcarlton.com

Tucked into a dense forest in Trentino’s Val Rendena, Lefay Resort & SPA Dolomiti occupies an enviable position perched on the edge of the town of Pinzolo, one of the gateways to the UNESCO-listed Dolomites.

Opened in 2019, the resort cascades down the mountainside across nine levels, with contemporary architecture that complements the landscape rather than competing with it. While many alpine hotels lean heavily on knotty pine and chalet nostalgia, Lefay takes a more refined approach. The exterior combines locally sourced larch and fir; the interiors layer chestnut, oak, stone, leather and bronze in a palette that feels quietly luxurious rather than overtly rustic.

The soaring A-frame bar is the architectural showpiece, its timber ceiling echoing the jagged silhouette of the Brenta Dolomites beyond. As dusk falls, the mountains perform one of nature's great spectacles: enrosadira, the phenomenon that bathes the limestone peaks in shades of coral and crimson. It’s best enjoyed from a window seat with a glass of Trentodoc sparkling wine or a classic Negroni in hand.

Why stay here?

Accommodation comprises 88 suites and 23 private residences, all generously proportioned and designed with understated elegance. Our suite was a blend of alpine warmth and contemporary Italian design: chestnut panelling, buttery leather armchairs, oversized rugs and sculptural lighting softened by a calming palette of taupe, charcoal and cream. A spacious living area included a work desk, generous seating and a large television, while the bedroom featured a king-size bed dressed in crisp Beltrami linens, a second, swivelling, TV and huge sofa positioned to frame the mountain views. Two walk-in wardrobes offered space for ski gear and hiking clothes alike.

The bathroom occupied almost the entire length of the suite and felt more spa than ensuite. Grey marble lined the expansive walk-in shower, and a deep whirlpool bath comfortably accommodated two. A private Finnish sauna, twin vanity areas and Lefay’s signature horse chestnut and verbena toiletries completed the indulgent experience.

The resort’s centrepiece is its 5,000 sq metres spa – one of the largest in the Alps. Inspired by traditional Chinese medicine and the changing seasons, it encompasses a series of thermal experiences including a Finnish sauna, salt grotto, tepidarium, hydrotherapy pools, plunge pools and sensory showers. Quiet relaxation rooms and outdoor terraces are focused firmly on the surrounding peaks, encouraging guests to look up rather than down at their phones. The heated indoor-outdoor infinity pool, complete with massage jets and bubbling hydrotherapy stations, proved the perfect perch for mountain-gazing.

Eating and drinking

Dolomia, the resort’s all-day restaurant, enjoys panoramic mountain views through floor-to-ceiling windows and centres around a striking glass wine cellar showcasing bottles from across Trentino-Alto Adige and beyond. Breakfast is particularly impressive, with fresh pastries, seasonal fruit, local yoghurts, eggs cooked to order and regional cheeses and cured meats. At lunch, hearty mountain dishes share the menu with lighter Mediterranean fare. Standouts included paccheri with slow-cooked white veal ragù, grilled beef entrecôte with roasted potatoes and a richly satisfying Caesar salad topped with prawns. A toasted sandwich filled with locally produced Fontal cheese and sautéed red cabbage elevated comfort food into something more memorable.

Dinner continues the regional theme, with beautifully executed northern Italian cooking. Buckwheat ravioli filled with Prà Fiorito cheese and Swiss chard celebrated local artisanal ingredients, while a refined chicken cacciatore demonstrated impressive restraint. Unmissable desserts included a subtle wild berry cheesecake on a chocolate cookie base.

The culinary highlight, however, is Grual, the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant named after the mountain that rises behind the resort. The intimate dining room evokes an alpine woodland at twilight, with deep teal walls, sculptural lighting and stylised tree motifs.

Chef Matteo Maenza builds menus around ingredients sourced from the surrounding valley, mountain pastures and high peaks. It offers tasting menus of eight or 12 courses, but ordering à la carte allows each dish to shine. Red turnip gnocchi paired with smoked ricotta and black tea delivered earthy complexity; rabbit ravioli with candied walnuts and local cheese struck a perfect balance between richness and finesse. A beautifully constructed cocoa millefeuille provided an elegant finale. Service throughout was warm and impeccably judged.

Things to do

The Dolomites take centre stage year-round. During summer, the Pinzolo cable car climbs to Doss del Sabion at 2,100 metres, where panoramic views stretch across the Brenta range and an extensive network of walking trails caters for everyone from casual hikers to experienced mountaineers. Winter transforms the area into part of the Skiarea Campiglio Dolomiti di Brenta, linking the pistes of Pinzolo with Madonna di Campiglio and Folgarida-Marilleva for a combined 150km of skiing. The hotel shuttles skiers to the cable car.

Back in town, Pinzolo remains refreshingly low-key, with weekly markets selling local produce, clothing and handcrafted goods alongside independent cafés serving excellent cappuccini.

The spa treatments are central to the resort and deserve dedicated time in the itinerary. In a private chalet-inspired treatment suite, the Amongst the Forest ritual began with a shared soak in a handcrafted wooden tub before a couples’ massage using aromatic mountain herbs designed to ease tired muscles. The 80-minute Il Cerchio della Luna Anti-Ageing Facial combined Lefay’s botanical skincare range with deeply relaxing massage techniques, and L'Aurora nel Lago invited us to float for 40 minutes in a warm salt pool beneath a star-filled ceiling – unexpectedly meditative and wonderfully calming.

The verdict

Lefay Resort & SPA Dolomiti successfully reimagines the alpine wellness hotel for a modern international audience. The architecture is striking without overwhelming its surroundings; the food celebrates the region with confidence, and the spa itself is reason enough to visit. Whether your idea of a perfect mountain escape involves swooshing down the mountains, hiking through the Brenta Dolomites or simply watching the evening alpenglow from a bubbling outdoor pool, this is one of Italy’s most sophisticated mountain retreats.

Vicki was a guest of Lefay Resort & Spa Dolomiti; lefayresorts.com

A menu promising a “glistening digital cheesesteak or an eerily geometrical” turkey sandwich “evokes little more than horror in those who behold it”, said the New Yorker. So why are so many restaurants relying on generative AI to create their promotional materials and are these images straying towards false advertising?

‘Nauseating, nightmarish’

Images of food dishes were once “a thing to be drooled over”, highlighting the “sensual, the luscious, the beautiful”, but now a “nauseating, nightmarish quality defines AI’s insectified interpretation of human cuisine, as if food were just another surrealist goo to stochastically iterate upon”. These fake images “mock life itself”.

The menus might also mock the customers, Adaeze Onejeme, an ad sales worker in Los Angeles, told CNN. “It’s like you don’t even know what you’re going to get” when the actual food arrives, so “at that point, is it false advertising”?

The “phenomenon” is seen around the world, said the broadcaster. In Tokyo, sandwiches are advertised with an image in which they seem to be “made of cobwebs”, in Kuala Lumpur, a bowl of spaghetti marinara “looks like perfectly arranged yarn or strings of Play-Doh”, and in Berlin, there is a “plastic-looking quiche with holes or a penne pasta made from rubber”.

‘Low quality, laziness’

These menu images can signify qualities people generally don’t want to associate with food, such as “low quality, laziness or, well, slop”. Some of them are “alienlike catastrophes”.

There’s “an innateness” to how real food looks that “you can feel in your bones”, Emily Hawkes, a professional food photographer, told USA Today. So when you see AI food images “there’s something wrong, and you might not be able to put your finger on it, but you know it when you see it”.

There’s a reason why we can't look away from the pictures, said psychologist Stephanie Sarkis: our brain gets stuck between “approach and avoidance” as it tries to make sense of an image that looks almost real but is clearly fake.

Running a restaurant in 2026 is challenging because of “rising costs and uneven customer traffic”, said CNN. So “as they look to save money wherever possible”, a growing number of restaurant owners are using AI to “assist with marketing”.

But if food photography is “cost-prohibitive” for an establishment, there are “other avenues to explore” rather than turning to generative AI, Hawkes told USA Today. She suggests contacting student photographers and offering a free meal in exchange for content, or consulting YouTube tutorials for a DIY approach.

‘Onslaught’

Directed by Adam Wingard (R)

★★

“If you’ve seen this type of movie before, the makers of Onslaught are betting you’ll want to see their ersatz rehash, too,” said Simon Abrams in RogerEbert.com. A sci-fi action-horror flick that might have made more sense if it was released in the 1980s, this “empty-headed” siege drama pits an Army-vet single mom against three government-engineered super soldiers. But while it delivers “some satisfyingly full-throated gore effects,” Onslaught “isn’t thoughtful enough to make you care about its paint-by-numbers story beats” and does nothing with its potentially timely vision of the American military unleashing mayhem on U.S. citizens.

At least it gives the “magnetic” Adria Arjona her first solo lead role, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. Playing an ex-sniper now raising a young daughter in a trailer park, the Andor and Hit Man star “gets to shoot, quip, and chainsaw her way to the center of the frame” when the super soldiers escape from a military lab and begin killing every human in sight. Still, there’s a limit to what Arjona can do with the role because “the situations she’s placed into are not quite inventive enough.” Director Adam Wingard, who’s returning here to indie filmmaking after two Godzilla vs. Kong movies, has called Onslaught a B movie with A-movie polish, but “I’d call it a B-minus success.” Though “the violence is sometimes spectacular,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap, “the actual onslaught part of the movie doesn’t begin until surprisingly late.” More surprisingly, “the film ends just when it’s getting good.”

‘The Dog Stars’

Directed by Ridley Scott (R)

★★

“At this point in his career, Ridley Scott can churn out a feature like The Dog Stars in his sleep,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. “The question is, why did he want to when it boasted so little originality?” The director of Alien and Blade Runner, now 88, is “the rare artist who knows how to visually paint on a big-screen canvas,” but that talent isn’t enough to save this “by-the-books” post-apocalyptic drama about an isolated young widower with a dog, a small plane, and, eventually, a second chance at love.

The movie, which bombed on its opening weekend, works best as a character study, said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Despite its occasional gunfights and the presence of Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, and Guy Pearce in supporting roles, “the loneliness of the grieving survivalist is the main preoccupation,” and Jacob Elordi gets “his Clint Eastwood moment,” proving he could make a career of playing “steely, still-waters-run-deep” types. When the film focuses on Elordi’s dreamer and Brolin’s more distrustful survivalist, it’s “on reasonably solid ground,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. But even those characters “never quite transcend their outlines,” making Scott’s adaptation of a 2012 novel feel “fundamentally hollow.” Still, because any director could have underestimated how much the novel relied on its interiority, “I’m happy this 88-year-old director continues to churn out movies.” In fact, “I look forward to whatever comes next.”

A winding five-hour drive from Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu, the Phobjikha Valley is one of the Himalayan kingdom’s most beautiful places, and also a prime spot to see black-necked cranes, said Ian Trower in DestinAsian.

With their striking black-and-white plumage and crimson crowns, these rare birds are “revered” by locals, who call them “birds of heaven”. Conservation efforts have helped boost global numbers from around 6,000 in the 1990s to more than 17,000 today, and each year several hundred overwinter in Phobjikha’s “farm-fringed” wetlands.

Their arrival is celebrated with a festival of folk music and dancing at the 17th-century Gangtey Monastery. Tour operators such as Ampersand and hotels such as the luxurious Gangtey Lodge offer bird-watching walks, and there’s also an exhibition at the valley’s “decagonal” Black-Necked Crane Information Centre. Go between November and mid-March, when the birds return to the Tibetan Plateau for the summer.

Hiking in the mountains of Bavaria

It’s not particularly popular with British visitors, but the Allgäu region of southern Bavaria is a lovely place for summer hiking, said Will Hide in The Times.

On a recent trip, I stayed at the Hubertus Mountain Refugio, a 66-room “wellness resort” with a big spa, an outdoor pool and friendly staff dressed in dirndls and lederhosen. The surrounding Alpine peaks rise above 2,600 metres and allow for lots of long, bracing walks through woods and flower meadows.

For lazier days, there’s plenty of cultural interest within easy reach, including Lake Constance (a 45-minute drive west), the picturesque historic town of Kempten, and Neuschwanstein, the “fairy-tale” palace built by King Ludwig II. Two of his other residences – Hohenschwangau and Linderhof – are also within striking distance.

A coastal walk in northern Cumbria

Few corners of the UK feel as on the edge of things as the north Cumbria coast, a low-lying strip hemmed in by the Lake District fells, said Chris Moss in The Guardian.

It is beautiful but “gritty” too, and scarred by industry in parts, as I discovered on a recent three-day walk along its portion of the England Coast Path. From Maryport (a pleasant town where L.S. Lowry liked to paint), I went south to St Bees Head, with its “spectacular” cliffs, a journey of 23 miles.

Highlights along the way included Workington (a friendly place that “looks as its name sounds”) and Whitehaven, surely one of England’s “loveliest” coastal towns – a former “industrial powerhouse” with “crumbling” grandeur in spades, but which also has a “striking” new hotel, The Edge, an angular, “rust-coloured” building by the sea.