Comedian's disturbing Netflix drama about stalking

The seven-part drama "Baby Reindeer" has been a hit for Netflix, drawing both critical acclaim and more than 13 million viewers, said Emma Jacobs in the FT. At its heart is "a visceral, complex tale of stalking and sexual violence", loosely based on the real-life experiences of 34-year-old Scottish comedian Richard Gadd, its star and creator.

The story "begins with a small act of kindness", when Donny (Gadd) – an aspiring stand-up comic working in a London pub – sneaks Martha (Jessica Gunning) a free cup of tea. Over the next few months, she carpet-bombs Donny with "love", sending him 41,000 emails and sitting for hours outside his home. The drama has a more nuanced take on stalking than, say, Fatal Attraction; and it is punctuated throughout with "dark humour".

Adapted from a one-man play by Gadd, "Baby Reindeer" makes for "distressing viewing", said Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian. At points, "the sheer onslaught of pain is difficult to endure"; and episode four – in which we discover a crucial fact about Donny – is one of the most disturbing episodes of TV I have seen in a long time. Still, this is a "compelling and unforgettable" series, and Gunning is "truly fantastic" as the stalker.

The drama lags a bit, and its over-reliance on voiceover betrays its stage roots, said Benji Wilson in The Daily Telegraph. But there is something undeniably "thrilling" in watching a man who is "introspective to the point of narcissism" self-combust. The series is basically "public therapy" – and the question is: "Do you want to go there?"

by Hampton Sides

In July 1776, Captain James Cook set off from Plymouth on what was to be his third and final voyage. Its main aim was to locate the Northwest Passage – the elusive sea route connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – but it also had a secondary objective, which was to repatriate a Polynesian man named Mai, whom Cook had picked up on his previous expedition and brought back to England.

In this "thrilling and superbly crafted book", the US historian Hampton Sides narrates the story of the voyage, said Andrew Graybill in The Wall Street Journal. All went "smoothly enough" at first: after stopping off in New Zealand (which he'd visited twice before), Cook repatriated Mai to Tahiti in August 1777 and then struck out "across the vast expanse of the Pacific". He came upon an archipelago that didn't appear on any map – the Hawaiian islands – and proceeded to travel up North America's northwest coastline. Having passed through the Bering Strait in August 1777, he began his "arduous and ultimately unsuccessful" search for the Northwest Passage.

By now in his late 40s, Cook was no longer as even-tempered as he'd once been, said Doug Bock Clark in The New York Times. He "became startlingly free with the disciplinary whip", and in Polynesia he responded to the theft of a single goat by "sending his mariners to burn whole villages". Whatever the cause of his "moral collapse" – some have linked it to a parasite picked up from eating bad fish – it contributed to his untimely demise. Returning to Hawaii in 1779, Cook reacted to the theft of a small boat by kidnapping the Hawaiian king, and was "clubbed and stabbed to death".

In recent decades, Cook has come to be seen as the "symbolic villain of European colonialism in the Pacific", said Wynn Wheldon in The Spectator. But to judge from this "riveting book", his critics have "got the wrong man". Despite having grown "old and crotchety", Cook remained fascinated by indigenous peoples, and worried about the diseases and influences contact with his men would introduce. He remained, too, a "cartographer of genius". The "magic" of this book lies in its detailing of nautical life, from struggles with rat infestations to the challenges of re-provisioning, said Martha Anne Toll in The Washington Post. "Armed with extensive research and terrific writing", Sides has captured the sheer strangeness of a time when "Europeans were finding unfathomable new worlds".

US journalist held hostage in Lebanon for seven years

In 1985, the American journalist Terry Anderson was living in Beirut, working as the bureau chief for the Associated Press, said The Daily Telegraph. The security situation had been deteriorating, and there had been a spate of kidnappings of Westerners. But Anderson, a former US marine who had served in Vietnam, kept going about his daily life as normal – and on 16 March, as he travelled home from a game of tennis, gunmen bundled him into a car. "That's what got me kidnapped," he admitted later. "Arrogance." He would spend nearly seven years as a captive of Islamist militants linked to Hezbollah, who indicated that they were seeking vengeance for the use of American weapons in Israeli strikes on Lebanon.

In his memoir, Anderson said that the first years were the worst. He was held in chains, often blindfolded, and regularly beaten. Transported between cellars and lightless rooms, he spent long periods in solitary confinement which was agonising, though he found solace in the company of a mouse who'd visit him in the night. As international tensions eased, his conditions improved a bit. There was more food, and he came into contact with other hostages, including the writers John McCarthy and Brian Keenan, and Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury's envoy who had been sent to negotiate the release of Western hostages, and ended up being seized himself. The other captives would later describe Anderson as a humorous and courageous man, who fought hard to get better conditions for them all. Sometimes, however, he came close to despair. A Catholic, he read the Bible over and over; but when he prayed there was "just a blankness", he recalled, "and the thought, 'I'm talking to myself, not God.'"

Back in the US, his sister campaigned tirelessly on his behalf. Yet he was the last of 18 Western hostages to be freed. Following his release in December 1991, he was reunited with Madeleine Bassil, the Lebanese Christian woman to whom he had become engaged before he was seized; and he met his six-year-old daughter by her for the first time. He and Bassil married soon after. But adjusting to normal life proved difficult. His marriage broke down; he became estranged from his daughter (they were later reconciled); and though he was awarded $26 million in frozen Iranian assets in compensation for his ordeal, he soon lost the money in bad investments. However, he had used some of it to co-found a charity, which built 50 schools in Vietnam, and to fund a range of community projects in the Appalachians. He taught journalism at various universities and, after retiring, settled on a small ranch in Virginia. Reflecting in 2018 on his years in captivity, he said: "I did not recognise sufficiently the damage that had been done. People ask me if I'm over it. Well, I don't know. No, not really."