Florence Pugh stars in superhero film about an 'ill-matched squad of anti-heroes'  

Having "muscled countless independent films out of cinema screens", Marvel has had the "audacity" to promote its latest apostrophe-d addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise "as a big-budgeted film with the 'feel' of a low-budgeted one", said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent.

It even boasts, with a wink, that the film was made by a "crew of indie veterans who sold out". Well, it's annoying but getting those people involved has paid off, because the film is pretty good. The titular Thunderbolts are "an ill-matched squad of anti-heroes" drawn from previous Marvel films, who squabble at first but then bond over their shared PTSD: Florence Pugh (pictured above, right) is back as Yelena Belova, still reeling from the death of her pseudo sister, Black Widow, in "Avengers: Endgame". There is also a fresh appearance from Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a deliciously Machiavellian CIA director.

The story itself is "super-silly" but done with "terrific brio", said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. Faced with possible impeachment over her involvement in a nefarious project, Dreyfus unleashes Bob, a genetically engineered superhuman with world-destroying powers. She hopes to set the Thunderbolts against each other; instead, they unite to foil her wicked scheme.

There are some "cool fight sequences", said Fatima Sheriff in Little White Lies, and the storytelling is "miles better" than the franchise's norm. But it's a low bar, and the film's endless references back to the plots of previous Marvel movies ultimately become wearisome. You can't help feeling that "a potentially great film" has been "downgraded to good by its inability to escape the wider Marvel machine".

by Owen Hatherley  

"Between 1933 and 1940, about 100,000 refugees from central Europe came to Britain to escape the nightmare of fascism," said Christopher Turner in Literary Review. Mostly Jewish, many were also left-wing and artistically inclined. The influx included "exiles from the Bauhaus, a design school shuttered by the Nazis", art historians Ernst Gombrich and Nikolaus Pevsner, writers Elias Canetti and Arthur Koestler, and architects Ernö Goldfinger and Berthold Lubetkin.

In this "well-researched and monumental" study, Owen Hatherley looks at the impact these émigrés had on "stagnant, stale Britain". Many, he argues, were culturally transformative, bringing avant-garde ideas to painting, photography and architecture. "Crammed with extraordinary revelations" – such as the fact that US talk show host Jerry Springer grew up in a north London modernist building designed by Sigmund Freud's son – "The Alienation Effect" makes a "compelling case for immigration as a national life force".

The émigrés homed in on northwest London's Hampstead and the Finchley Road ("Finchleystrasse"), said Rupert Christiansen in The Telegraph. But they weren't insular: many were intensely interested in what Hatherley calls the "strangeness of England". Bill Brandt took "eerie photographs" of working-class communities in the northeast, and Pevsner documented English architecture in his "epic" "The Buildings of England". There were filmmakers – Michael Powell's Hungarian collaborator Emeric Pressburger, the animator Lotte Reiniger – as well as influential book designers and publishers. The "trailblazing publishing houses" Phaidon and Thames & Hudson were both the "brainchildren of émigrés".

The newcomers "didn't exactly get a warm welcome", said Pratinav Anil in The Guardian. The Daily Mail fulminated about "stateless Jews", and a third of them were interned as "enemy aliens" on the Isle of Man in 1940. Yet, despite this, many made permanent homes in England, drawn to the fact that it was peaceable and conservative and had, as Hatherley writes, "somehow sat out the 20th century".

Although often under-credited and under-recognised, this diaspora had a lasting impact on British cultural life, said Rowan Moore in The Observer. We owe to them, in whole or part, "the Royal Festival Hall, Penguin Books and 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea'". While an "occasionally chewy read", Hatherley's book is mostly an "acute, informative, passionate and witty" tribute to "achievement in the face of adversity".

Acclaimed novelist known for her 'Old Filth' trilogy

Jane Gardam (pictured above), who has died aged 96, was regarded by many as the "unsung heroine of English fiction", said The Telegraph. Although the humanity, clarity and wit of her writing won comparisons with Jane Austen and Katherine Mansfield, she never achieved the "popular acclaim of contemporaries such as Margaret Drabble or Penelope Lively". Nevertheless, she had many admirers and was showered with prizes, including two Whitbread awards.

Having come to prominence when she was in her 40s, she produced what is arguably her finest book at the age of 76, said The Washington Post. "Old Filth" reflects on the life of a retired barrister, Sir Edward Feathers, who was known to his colleagues as Filth, because he had "failed in London, tried Hong Kong". Wry yet tender, "Old Filth" was voted one of Britain's 100 best books in a BBC survey in 2015. It spawned two companion novels and gained Gardam new readers in the US. "As the best artists do, she offers hard truths in a pleasurable way," the novelist Susan Minot wrote in an essay in The Paris Review in 2022. "There is no overindulgence. Sensuous details are side by side with a sharp intelligence… Philosophical musings merge into social commentary but you notice no intrusion because you are mesmerised by the story. The story is everything."

Born Jean Pearson, in 1928, Gardam was brought up in North Yorkshire, where her father was a maths teacher, but spent holidays on her grandparents' farm in West Cumberland, which provided the setting for many of her books. She wrote stories as a child and, aged 17, she won a scholarship to study English at Bedford College, London. Coal and food were in short supply in 1945, she recalled, but, to her, it was just "wonderful" that the war was over and "we were alive". After graduating, she worked as a travelling librarian for The Red Cross and then as assistant literary editor of Time and Tide. In 1954, she married David Gardam, a barrister and later QC, whose work often took him overseas; soon after, she gave up her job to start a family. They lived in a large house in Wimbledon, where, for several years, she dedicated herself to motherhood. But on the morning that the youngest of her three children started school, she was so anxious to get back to her writing desk, she ran all the way home. "I was desperate to get started – I was possessed," she told The Guardian in 2011.

Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical "A Long Way From Verona", is about a bookish 13-year-old growing up in the north of England during the Second World War. Its opening line reads: "I ought to tell you, at the beginning, that I am not quite normal." Although its themes are quite adult, it was marketed as a children's book. Her first book specifically for adults, "Black Faces, White Faces", came out in 1975. She won her first Whitbread Prize in 1981 for her children's novel, "The Hollow Land" (1981), and her second for 1991's "The Queen of the Tambourine". It had been inspired by the sight of a well-dressed woman screaming on her local high street.

David Gardam died in 2010; their daughter, the botanical artist Catharine Nicholson, had breast cancer and died in 2011. Gardam, an Anglican with leanings to Quakerism, coped by pouring herself into the "Old Filth" trilogy. "Really, writing it was my salvation," she said. "To survive, you turn to what you can do, I suppose."