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

‘The Last Picture Show’ (1971)

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

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

‘The Godfather’ (1972)

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

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

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

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

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

‘Jaws’ (1975)

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

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

‘Network’ (1976)

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

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

‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977)

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

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

‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pass through the Guoliang Tunnel, Henan province

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

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

Take the Mount Huashan Plank Walk, Shaanxi province

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

Travel along the Sichuan-Tibet Highway

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

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

Go bungee jumping at Skypark Macau

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

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

Power paraglide in Yangshuo, Guangxi region

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

Walk across the Zhangjiajie Glass Bridge, Hunan province

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

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

The Fish, Cotswolds

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

Blakeney Hotel, Norfolk

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

Looking Glass Lodge, East Sussex

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

Middleton Lodge, North Yorkshire

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

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

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

Why stay here?

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

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

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

Eating and drinking

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

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

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

Things to do

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

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

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

The verdict

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

Hollie was a guest of Serenity at Coconut Bay

“Dying people in California could soon get support from a familiar face,” said The Times. Nicole Kidman has revealed she is training to become a death doula following the painful loss of her mother, Janelle, who died in 2024 aged 84.

The Oscar-winning actor admitted her new venture “sounds a little weird”. But she told an audience at the University of San Francisco she had discovered there was “only so much the family could provide” as her mother approached the end of her life. “That’s when I went, ‘I wish there was these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.’”

Bridging the gap

A death doula works in a “similar capacity” to a birth doula, said PhD candidate Syman Braun Freck on The Conversation. Instead of assisting a mother during pregnancy and childbirth, a death doula is a “community partner offering support to the dying”. They act as a “neutral third party”, inhabiting a space between family, medical professionals and funeral directors.

Death used to be a “sacred communal process” that took place within the “comfort” of the family home. But during the late 19th and early 20th century dying became “institutionalised” and “medicalised”, and loved ones were “pushed to the wayside”.

This gap in end-of-life care opened a space for a “host of paraprofessionals” and led in the early 2000s to the re-emergence of the “ancient practice” of death doulas.

These individuals aren’t medically trained. They provide practical, spiritual and emotional support for clients, helping them “navigate fear and uncertainty about death and what might come after it”, said The New York Times. Death doulas also assist people expressing their wishes for end-of-life care, help to facilitate “meaningful conversations with their families”, and provide guidance for loved ones left behind.

Meaningful ends

There has been a “rapid” rise in the number of people training to become death doulas in recent years, Dr Emma Clare, chief executive of End of Life Doula UK, told The Times. The charity has around 450 members, after more than 100 joined last year. And it’s not just those with a terminal illness who are using the service; since the pandemic, more “healthy 30-somethings” have also been seeking death doulas to plan a meaningful end to life. The NHS has started to recognise this work, in some cases commissioning doulas to provide additional palliative care for people dying at home.

“I wasn’t surprised” that Nicole Kidman chose to embark on her new venture after losing her mother, said death doula Anna Lyons in The Times. “People often enter into this line of work following grief. You suddenly understand what kind of support is needed.”

I work with people from diagnosis until they die, and support their families after they’re gone. “My role is primarily to listen” and “be a witness to the end of their life”, ensuring they don’t have to go through it alone. There is something “very beautiful about being able to help somebody” in this way. “It is a privilege.”

It is a “lovely thing that everybody should have the opportunity to utilise”, said Eva Wiseman in The Observer. And the “true benefit” of a celebrity doula could lie not in helping you to find peace in your final days, but instead in bringing “distraction from it”. To spend your last moments “holding the manicured hand of a person you loved (in “Moulin Rouge” and “The Others”) would not only add some sparkle to the painful mundanity of death but also, surely, provide meaning when we need it most”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking up is hard to do, but a gift registry could ease the pain. Functioning much like the wedding or baby shower version, a divorce registry lists items to purchase for a newly single person, to help them transition to their new life. The trend took off last year after the influencer Becca Murray created one following her divorce.

Financial and emotional loss

Divorces can be a heavy financial burden. Aside from hiring a lawyer, “you have to file your divorce with the court, potentially sell your marital property or negotiate a deal to buy it out, and deal with many other types of negotiations,” said Apartment Therapy. The process can “take years before it’s finalized.” And buying the small items required to rebuild amid such tumult is a drag.

A divorce registry “helps support people” who may be “suddenly losing half of their income, moving to a new home or refilling a half-empty one, all while paying for a divorce, which can cost five to six figures,” said Apartment Therapy. While married or dating, a couple “usually shares a lot of household essentials, like electronics, cookware and furniture,” which require replacing after splitting them and going separate ways, said Cafe Mom.

The products in divorce registries are “exactly what you think people need,” said Olivia Howell, the founder of the gift registry Fresh Starts, to CBS News. It’s the items that “your partner may have touched a lot: dishes, cups, utensils, towels, sheets, bedding, blankets.”

Healing and destigmatizing

“Even everyday items can carry heavy memories and leave homes feeling half-empty,” said CBS News. So receiving a gift from a breakup or divorce registry is a “great way to begin the healing process,” whether it’s a “cute pair of earrings” or “accessories to make your space your own again,” said the lifestyle publication Chatelaine.

Research shows that “emotional processing can be easier when the nervous system feels safer and more regulated,” said Jessica O’Reilly, a Toronto relationship expert with a Ph.D. in human sexuality, to the outlet. And a present from a loved one and a newly established routine can help regulate the nervous system.

Most of the people building divorce and breakup registries are women. But a breakup is nonetheless the great equalizer, and a “lot of men are in the same position [that] a lot of women are in,” said Howell to CBC. “They don’t have anything when they start out” after a divorce. And even though men may also be struggling, “culturally, a lot of men are told to not ask for help or support.”

The “shift toward destigmatizing divorce was already underway,” said the Fresh Starts website. A registry gives it “infrastructure, language and legitimacy.” Plus, filling your home with gifts from loved ones “helps bolster your confidence,” said Howell, and lets you “make bigger, bolder decisions in life.”

The tour operator Shakti Himalaya offers “culturally immersive” walking holidays in three remote, mountainous regions of India – Sikkim, Ladakh and Kumaon. But although these adventures take you far off the beaten track, says Pamela Goodman in Country Life, they involve none of the “hardship” such treks would usually entail.

The accommodation – in beautifully restored village houses or lodges – is “sumptuously comfortable”, with deep mattresses, wood-burning stoves and breathtaking views of snowcapped peaks (often through floor-to-ceiling windows). The food is fabulous, and the service is attentive. On the walks, picnic lunches are served on chequered-clothed tables in wooded glades.

For my latest trip with Shakti, I chose Kumaon, which makes up one half of the state of Uttarakhand, immediately northwest of Nepal. The company’s new showpiece here is Shakti Prana, a seven-bedroom lodge perched at 6,000 feet, with a “soul-filling” view of Nanda Devi (India’s second-highest peak after Kanchenjunga) and the five dramatic summits of the Panchachuli range. It sits a 45-minute walk from the nearest road, and a ten-hour, “helter-skelter” drive from the airport in Pantnagar, and so I broke up the journey with stays at Shakti’s three other Kumaon lodgings, all of which are restored village houses. One of them, Shakti Kana, sits in the very heart of a village on a steep terraced hillside, where local people greeted me as I trod the “slippery” path that wound between their homesteads.

The walks took us through sacred cedar forests and past 8th century temples, up “near-vertical” hillsides and beneath towering waterfalls. In the tiny villages through which we passed, people proffered fresh cucumber sprinkled with chilli and Himalayan salt, and mugs of warm milk “drawn straight from the cow”. And at Shakti Prana we soothed our limbs in the sauna and bathhouse, feeling like “epic adventurers” at the end of every day.

Cazenove+Loyd has a nine-night trip from £8,600pp (cazloyd.com).

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

Ingredients (serves 4)

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

Method

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

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

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

‘Elizabeth I’ (2005)

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

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

‘John Adams’ (2008)

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

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

‘House of Saddam’ (2008)

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

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

‘The Crown’ (2016-2023)

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

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

‘The Dropout’ (2022)’

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

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

‘George & Tammy’ (2022)

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

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

‘A Small Light’ (2023)

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

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

‘Mussolini: Son of the Century’ (2025)

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

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

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

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

Why stay here?

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

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

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

Eating and drinking

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

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

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

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

Things to do

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

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

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

The verdict

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

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

West Sussex: Iron Latch Cottage, Selsey

Charming Grade II, 17th century thatched cottage by Selsey Beach. 3 beds (1 en suite), shower, kitchen/dining room, recep, office, summer house, garden. £550,000; Hamptons.

Devon: Wytch Green, Hawkchurch

A characterful Grade II cottage dating back to c.1800. 3 beds, family bath, kitchen, recep, study, 1-bed annexe, garden, parking. £540,000; Symonds & Sampson.

Cornwall: Coastguard Cottages, Gorran Haven

This delightfully situated cottage (third from the right) has magnificent views overlooking the bay and out to sea. 2 beds (1 en suite), shower, kitchen/dining room, recep, garden. £525,000; Lillicrap Chilcott.

Kent: Clements Cottage, Chilham

A fine Grade II cottage by Chilham Castle, within the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. 3 beds (1 en suite), family bath, kitchen, 3 receps, garden, garage. £525,000; Strutt & Parker.

Wiltshire: Pitts Cottage, Chitterne

Handsome cottage set in well-tended mature gardens in a popular Wylye Valley village. 3 beds (1 en suite), shower, kitchen/dining room, recep, garden, parking. £435,000; Cooper and Tanner.

Suffolk: Pound Cottage, Wetherden

An attractive Grade II, 18th century thatched property in a peaceful rural setting. 2 beds, family bath, kitchen, 2 receps, studio, garden, garage. £399,950; Bedfords.

Essex: Castle Street, Saffron Walden

Eye- catching 16th century Grade II cottage with a wealth of period features. Main suite, 2 further beds, shower, kitchen/breakfast room, 4 receps, garden. £550,000; Cheffins.

Cambridgeshire: The Olde Stores, Ellington

Beautiful thatched cottage, nestled in the heart of a village, with exposed timbers and inglenook fireplaces. 4 beds (2 en suite), shower, kitchen, 2 receps, garden, parking. £525,000; Fine & Country.

Devon: Gardeners Cottage, Drewsteignton

A picturesque and beautifully renovated Grade II thatched cottage, located within Dartmoor National Park. 1 bed, 2 baths, kitchen/dining room, recep, garden, parking. £500,000; By Design.

For centuries, east London’s Lower Lea Valley was “a place of sullen and sometimes surreal industry”, said Catherine Slessor in The Guardian: people still talk about its “fridge mountain”.

But all that changed in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. This area became a focal point of the athletics – and when the Games ended, it was decided that their legacy would be the “Olympicopolis”, a cultural quarter inspired by the “Albertopolis” that was built in west London in the wake of the Great Exhibition. The quarter’s tongue-twisty nickname didn’t stick, but the vision was pursued, and its latest addition is this new outpost of the V&A.

Constructed at a cost of £135m, V&A East has “neither its own collection nor its own acquisition budget”, said Eleanor Halls in The Telegraph. Instead, it displays items borrowed from the archive of its parent institution in South Kensington – selected to appeal to younger visitors more interested in contemporary culture, politics and social justice than historic artefacts. “To mark that shift”, an 18ft-tall statue of a young black woman by Thomas J. Price stands outside the museum. He was among some 30,000 people aged 18 to 35 who were consulted about the museum, and some of their hopes for it – “equity”, “accountability”, “advocacy”, “generosity” – are engraved on the windows.

But if that makes you fear that this is going to be a collection “defined by buzz-words”, that will dissipate when you go inside, to the upstairs galleries answering the prompt “Why We Make”. These “luminous, unimposing” spaces contain some 500 exhibits – ranging from Vivienne Westwood costumes to Althea McNish’s glorious textiles – and feel “genuinely exciting”. But arguably the best reason to visit now is the inaugural temporary exhibition, which takes you – with headphones – through the history of black music in Britain. It covers everything from gospel and jazz to two-tone, ska and grime, while exploring the impact of the slave trade, and the way music has been used to convey resistance and suffering, as well as hope.

This museum contains much to celebrate, said Laura Freeman in The Times. And yet, it also disappoints. The building itself looks odd, all pointy like a “reconstructed Toblerone”. And the problems continue inside. The halls and stairwells are characterless; surfaces are “universally hard”. The signs look like “Scrabble tiles”; the benches are ugly (but comfy); and the bins would make William Morris shudder. How can a museum dedicated to design “be so insensitive to detail, beauty and proportion”?

As for the galleries, wandering them I found “my toes tingling with pleasure” at the beauty, the craftsmanship, the ingenuity, and also “curling in agony” at all the modish references to “lived experience” and “transcultural identities”. These flaws are maddening. But the museum is still a wonderful resource. “I am thrilled it is here.”

V&A East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London E20

The Slovenian philosopher picks five novels about global catastrophe that changed his thinking. He will be speaking about the ideas in his new book – “Liberal Fascisms” – in Bristol and London on 5 and 6 May.

The Drowned World

J.G. Ballard, 1962

This work depicts a future Earth made largely uninhabitable by solar radiation. In a flooded London, scientists take advantage of societal collapse to fulfil unconscious urges. The idea that a mega-catastrophe could create an opportunity to experience jouissance – surrendering oneself to a bliss that obliterates the limits of our subjectivity – profoundly influenced me.

The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin, 2006

Cixin’s masterpiece confronts Earth with Trisolaris, a planet whose unpredictable suns cause severe temperature shifts. As a critical ecologist, I see it as Earth in the near future; are we facing something for which the only appropriate term is “the end of nature”?

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005

Arguably the most depressing novel I’ve ever read, it explores a society where human clones are created to supply organs for transplant, a practice that requires a major shift in public morals. Is this not our situation today? We cope with new threats by reshaping our ethical principles.

I Who Have Never Known Men

Jacqueline Harpman, 1995

Perhaps even darker than Ishiguro’s novel, this work is about a girl locked in a bunker with 39 women. When the male guards flee, they emerge into a barren plain. The girl, the last to survive, writes about her life. Existentially, I feel like the girl: even in a crowd, I am totally alone, and my words will probably never reach their addressee. I think truly great thinkers also accept there will be no one to read them properly.

Station Eleven

Emily St John Mandel, 2014

An apocalyptic novel with a sort of happy ending. After an epidemic devastates humanity, one group, the Travelling Symphony, connects scattered communities by performing Shakespeare. I agree that, in our catastrophic predicament, we need more than just survival to survive.

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

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

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

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

Shaftesbury Theatre, London WC2. Until 29 August

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tulips in many of the UK’s most well-known gardens are already in full bloom after the particularly wet and mild start to spring.

The country is home to hundreds of varieties of the perennial bulb, in vivid shades of crimson, yellow and purple. Whether you’re planning a romantic day out or a family-friendly activity, these are some of the best places to see them.

Farmer Copleys Tulip Festival, West Yorkshire

This festival at Ravensknowle Farm near Pontefract is “one of the biggest celebrations of the spring flower in the north”, said Lauren Hughes in Country Living.

Home to “over 100 varieties and a million flowers”, Farmer Copleys offers “many photo opportunities” to its visitors. There is a giant Ferris wheel on site, with “panoramic views” over the “vast tulip fields”, and you can make your own bouquet to take home. As tulip season starts a bit later in the north of England, this festival lasts slightly longer than others.

Until 3 May, farmercopleys.co.uk

RHS Garden Wisley, Surrey

RHS Garden Wisley is a "sea of vibrant colour" at this time of year, said Laura Nightingale in the Daily Express. More than 100,000 tulips have been planted, carefully chosen for their “fabulous shapes and staggered flowering times”. Visitors can take in the “most iconic views” of the Old Laboratory building and Jellicoe Canal when the flowers are in full bloom. Wisley has some “lovely cafes and coffee shops dotted along its tulip route” if you’re looking to refuel during your stroll.

rhs.org.uk

Ham House, Richmond

If you find yourself in or around London, this “17th-century kitchen garden” featured in the latest season of Netflix’s “Bridgerton” is not to be missed, said Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin in The Times. The grounds are filled with both “formal, historic varieties” of tulip as well as “thousands of naturalised, wild-style” flowers. Alongside the “500,000 spring bulbs”, there is also a cherry garden and fruit trees. History lovers can explore the “beer cellar, the duchess’s bathroom and the historic kitchen” in the house.

nationaltrust.org.uk

Tulleys Tulip Festival, West Sussex

This farm in West Sussex has more than 130 varieties of tulips that are “planted in long, ordered rows”, said Morris-Zumin. You can “walk directly through” them or choose to explore the place using an “observation wheel” that’s about 100ft high; from here, you will get views out across a “lake with floating tulip beds”. In addition to the “impressive” floral landscape, there is a “theatre and live music” programme as well as a bar, food stalls and “Dutch-inspired offerings”.

tulipfarm.co.uk

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

‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)

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

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

‘The Truman Show’ (1998)

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

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

‘Minority Report’ (2002)

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

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

‘Children of Men’ (2006)

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

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

‘Idiocracy’ (2006)

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

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

‘Contagion’ (2011)

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

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

‘Her’ (2013)

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

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

‘Ex Machina’ (2014)

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

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

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

Toy Story (1995)

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

Finding Nemo (2003)

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

The Incredibles (2004)

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

Ratatouille (2007)

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

Wall-E (2008)

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

Up (2009)

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

Inside Out (2015)

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

Afrika Bambaataa was a formative figure in hip-hop, as influential at the start as his better-known peers Grandmaster Flash and DJ Kool Herc. At South Bronx street parties in the 1970s, he galvanized the crowds with breakbeat DJing that incorporated sounds ranging from funk and rock to electronica, salsa, and movie soundtracks. He helped bring hip-hop into the mainstream in 1982 with his electrofunk breakout hit “Planet Rock,” built around a keyboard riff from the German electronic group Kraftwerk.

Beyond his musical contributions, Bambaataa also helped shape hip-hop as a broader cultural movement, founding the collective Universal Zulu Nation, which supported the four components of hip-hop: DJing, MCing, breakdancing, and graffiti art. “I was seeing all this that was happening,” he said in 2009, “and decided to make this as a cultural movement.”

Born Lance Taylor, he was raised by his Jamaican mother in a housing project in the South Bronx, a neighborhood blighted by “years of economic neglect,” said the Associated Press. Thanks to his mother’s extensive record collection, he “was exposed to music at an early age,” and as he began to DJ at community centers his “ability to repurpose and mix old hits became one of his signatures.” By 1975, when he was 22, he had adopted his stage name—drawn from a 19th-century Zulu leader— and was bringing his parties to a bigger audience, said The Guardian, “pulling together crews of fledgling rappers, organizing breakdancing competitions, and generally helping to create a new aesthetic.” As hip-hop grew popular, he helped move it from funk and soul beats “toward a more futuristic technopop feel.” His “Planet Rock” was the epitome of that sound, and “one of the earliest rap songs to impinge on the wider public consciousness.”

“Prolific to a fault,” Bambaataa went on to release dozens of albums, said Rolling Stone, and collaborate with artists such as James Brown, George Clinton, and former Sex Pistol John Lydon. But allegations of a dark past came out in 2016, when three men accused him of having sexually abused them in the 1990s. Other men then also came forward to say he’d abused them as teens, and one filed suit. Bambaataa denied all the allegations but lost the civil case after refusing to appear in court. His legacy as “a foundation architect of hip-hop culture” will remain, rap pioneer Kurtis Blow said after Bambaataa’s death, but that “legacy is complex.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Batman’ (1966-1968)

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

‘Smallville’ (2001-2011)

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

‘Jessica Jones’ (2015-2019)

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

‘Daredevil’ (2015-2018)

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

‘Legion’ (2017-2019)

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

‘The Boys’ (2019–)

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

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

‘Watchmen’ (2019)

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

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

‘WandaVision’ (2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From ordering groceries online to using AI to write emails, technology is making life exponentially easier. But while that may be appealing, it has also become a crutch, and constantly outsourcing our thinking can be detrimental in the long term, according to experts. A new trend called friction maxxing seeks to reintroduce discordance into our lives.

‘Building up tolerance for inconvenience’

Tech companies are succeeding in “making us think of life itself as inconvenient” and an endeavor we should be “continuously escaping” from into “digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands,” sociologist ​​Kathryn Jezer-Morton said at The Cut. The businesses have invested “as much money as possible in friction-elimination tools that effectively dehumanize users.”

It is a method that is “especially evil” because our “love of escaping is one of humanity’s most poetically problematic tendencies, and now it’s being used against us,” said Jezer-Morton. Enter “friction maxxing,” which isn’t “simply a matter of reducing your screen time.” Rather, it requires “building up tolerance for inconvenience” and then “reaching toward enjoyment.”

Friction-maxxing practices could include navigating by road signs instead of Google Maps or arranging to meet up with friends without sharing your location. Or it could mean eschewing ChatGPT for information that could be gleaned from a book or asking other people. Each of these acts may seem insignificant, but an “orientation toward friction is really the only defense we have against the life-annihilating suction of technologies of escape,” said Jezer-Morton.

Friction maxxing may “play a valuable role in reorienting yourself away from tech dependency” and back toward “embracing the effort that makes people feel genuinely alive and fulfilled,” Mashable said. No one needs to optimize their life in “pursuit of a proverbial gold star.”

The effect of frictionless living

Despite how easy technology advancements have made simple tasks, “living a frictionless life may not be the best for your cognitive function over time,” said The Washington Post. It is basically “having a personal trainer lift the weights for you,” neuroscientist Lila Landowski said to the Post.

Over time, frictionless living could be detrimental because brain functions like learning, memory and focused attention are “use it or lose it,” brain health researcher Marc Milstein, the author of “The Age-Proof Brain,” said to the Post. You need to practice these skills to maintain them. If you’re not regularly challenging your brain, those skills can erode, he said.

And the benefit of friction maxxing isn’t just in boosting cognitive abilities. It also helps to create a more meaningful life said, Emily Falk, a professor and author of “What We Value,” to the Post. If you value building social skills, for example, the ease of writing an email with AI may not align with your values and may make life feel less meaningful. When we “make choices that seem immediately rewarding but don’t take a step back to ask if those choices are compatible with big-picture goals and values, we can get in trouble.”

Many of our decisions about convenience are driven by “short-term emotions,” said Forbes. It feels good to order delivery “because you remove the worry of your kids messing up the ingredients you need to cook.” It feels good to scroll “because you know getting into a challenging book will feel lousy (at least initially).” On the other hand, if you can “learn to grapple with these pesky emotions head-on, the long-term benefits are big.”

Our comfort with friction is “under attack,” and we “bear the responsibility of keeping friction intact as part of our families’ lives” and should “notice the ways that it’s being sanded away for profit,” Jezer-Morton said. Perhaps this is an opportunity to “think more clearly than we ever have about what is interesting and essential about being human.” We have never before “had a chance to see our own humanity so clearly,” but now, with “tech innovation bearing down on us so hard, we can’t take it for granted anymore.”

Set in the heart of the Sahara, the Ennedi and Tibesti mountains of northern Chad are spectacular and fabulously remote. They are also home to a “treasury” of ancient rock art, said Sophy Roberts in the Financial Times.

Made from ochre mixed with human saliva, these drawings date back more than 5,000 years, when the landscape here was green. Depicting dancers and hunters, cows and horses, elephants and giraffes, they are “masterpieces” with an “oddly modern” air, sometimes calling to mind Matisse, Modigliani or Chagall. The journey to see them, however, is “not for the faint- hearted”. Not only are the distances involved huge, but the Foreign Office advises against travel in these areas, with dangers including landmines and rebel attacks. I recently chose to visit even so.

Travelling with the long-established local tour operator Société de Voyages Sahariens (SVS), our party flew by small plane from Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, to the Ennedi Massif, where we stayed at SVS’s Warda Camp. Among the sandstone pillars and towering rock arches nearby, we saw paintings of dozens of galloping horses and a rider in a plumed headdress. And at Grande Riparo, a cave 50 metres above the wadi floor, there’s a magnificent 15-metre parade of running archers and cattle with sickle-moon horns. The flight onwards to Tibesti took a full two hours.

We camped in the Ouri Valley, a great plain “hidden inside a formidable rim of Mordor-like peaks”. Our guides, Rocco Ravà of SVS and the rock art researcher Pier Paolo Rossi, said the air strip here had last been used in the 1960s, and only a few dozen foreign travellers had reached the valley overland since then. The valley is studded with rocky tumuli as much as 140 metres across – ancient “compass” graves, so named for their precise east-west alignment.

And there’s so much rock art that we found some hitherto undocumented examples – an elephant, a rhino, giraffes, and a dancing man with a birdlike beak and a penis “swinging down to his knee”.

A nine-night trip costs from approx. £15,000pp excl. flights (svstchad.com).

There’s always one person in a family that makes the best version of a particular dish, said Brin Pirathapan: and in my family, everyone knows that my mum’s fried aubergine is the best aubergine dish around. There would be a full-on revolt if anyone turned up to a party at our family home and there wasn’t a vat of it waiting to be demolished. Mum passed on the recipe to me, but there’s an element of intuition that can’t be written down. None of us can fully live up to her famous dish, but we can try.

Ingredients (serves 4-6, as a side)

• 3 aubergines, cut into 1cm cubes
• vegetable or sunflower oil, for deep-frying
• 6 garlic cloves, 3 peeled and left whole, 3 grated
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 3 dried red chillies (optional)
• 1½ red onions, finely diced
• 10-15 curry leaves (fresh, if available)
• 2.5cm piece of fresh ginger, grated
• ½ tsp hot chilli powder (or more if you like it spicy)
• 3 tomatoes, diced
• sea salt (optional)

Method

• If you sprinkle the aubergine cubes with salt to draw out a bit of moisture before frying, it can really enhance the flavour of the aubergine, but this is up to you.
• Heat enough oil in a deep-fat fryer (if you have one) or in a heavy-based saucepan (don’t fill the pan more than two-thirds full) to 180C (or until a small piece of bread browns in 30 seconds).
• Add the aubergine cubes to the hot oil in batches and then remove (using a slotted spoon) when the flesh turns a deep golden brown colour and the skin is shiny. Transfer them to lots of kitchen paper to soak up the excess oil, while you fry the remaining batches.
• When the aubergine is cooked, turn off the heat, add the whole garlic cloves to the hot oil and leave to soften and colour for 5 minutes, then add to the cooked aubergine.
• Heat the olive oil in a large pan or wok over a medium-high heat, then once it’s hot, add the cinnamon stick and whole dried red chillies (if using). After about 30 seconds, add the red onions and curry leaves. Give it all a decent mix and cook for a couple of minutes.
• Add the grated garlic and ginger along with the chilli powder and tomatoes. Mix, then add the fried aubergine cubes and whole garlic cloves. Give it a good stir and pop a lid on, then let that cook over a medium heat for about 15 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes. Plate up and enjoy!

Taken from Elevate: Everyday Ingredients, Incredible Flavours by Brin Pirathapan

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On the champions’ podium of 1980s action cinema, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone “fought over gold and silver position”, said Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian. “Bronze belonged indisputably to Chuck Norris, who has died aged 86.”

Origin story

He was an expert martial artist, a six-time world middleweight karate champion who ran his own chain of dojos in California. Among his pupils in the mid-1960s was Steve McQueen, who suggested that he should pursue a screen career.

A spectacular fight sequence with Bruce Lee in “The Way of the Dragon” in 1972 – in which he played a rare villainous role – led to a series of “gung-ho” action pictures, such as “Missing in Action” (1984) and “Invasion U.S.A.” (1985). Violent and unsophisticated they may have been, but Norris insisted on the soundness of the philosophy behind them. “I don’t initiate violence, I retaliate,” he said.

He was born Carlos Ray Norris in Ryan, Oklahoma, in 1940, to parents of mixed Irish and Cherokee descent. His father, Ray, who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, was an alcoholic, “and his long binges crippled the family finances and burdened his waitress wife, Wilma”, said The Times. She moved with her three sons – one of whom, Wieland, was later killed in Vietnam – to LA. There Carlos attended Torrance High School, but was bullied for being mixed race, unathletic and cripplingly shy.

At 18 he joined the US air force as a policeman, and in 1958 was sent to Osan, South Korea, where he acquired the nickname Chuck, and became interested in martial arts such as taekwondo and tang soo do, a version of karate. Back at home, while on the waiting list to join the Los Angeles police, he opened a martial arts school in his mother’s backyard, and found that it fulfilled him. His first acting role was a small part as a heavy in Dean Martin’s “The Wrecking Crew” (1968); his first starring vehicle came a decade later.

What took him into the mainstream was the 1980s vogue for films “that chimed with the national mood of wanting a resurgent America to hit back after its humiliation in Vietnam”. In “Missing in Action”, he rescued PoWs from Vietnam while showcasing his martial arts prowess. An even bigger hit was “The Delta Force” (1986), in which he and Lee Marvin fought terrorists in the Middle East. McQueen had reputedly advised Norris after seeing his first films that he should aim for “less dialogue”, and this approach won out, particularly in his best-known success, the TV drama “Walker, Texas Ranger”.

For eight seasons from 1993, he played a lone-wolf lawman with “a black belt and an iron will”. At the peak of his fame, two men tried to mug him in Dallas. When the police arrived, they found the men with broken arms, knives on the ground and Norris, then 54, waiting quietly. “We knew who he was,” the men said. “We just figured that all that stuff on television was fake.”

“The transformation of his life often awed him,” said The Economist. Born into miserable poverty in the Oklahoma backwoods, he was now in a place where the public, “half-joking, thought he could do anything”. By the early 2000s, his hardman persona had made him an ironic cult hero, and a long trail of “Chuck Norris facts” started appearing online: claiming that he made onions cry; that Superman wore Chuck Norris pyjamas; that he was the only person who could slam a revolving door.

Norris had always been on the conservative, evangelical Right, said The Telegraph; he was a staunch Reaganite in the 1980s. In 2008, he published “Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America”. In 2016, he endorsed Donald Trump. Norris married Dianne Kay Holechek in 1958; they had two sons but divorced in 1989. In 1998, he married Gena O’Kelley; they had twin daughters. He also had a daughter from another relationship.

In May 2025, Ye – formerly Kanye West – released a single called “Heil Hitler”, which contained a lengthy sample from one of Hitler’s speeches, said Dan Hancox in The Guardian.

Around the same time, he started selling swastika T-shirts on his website. As a result, the musician, who has frequently been accused of racism, homophobia and sexism, was sued by his own talent agency, and denied entry to Australia. So news that he had been booked to headline the three-day Wireless Festival in north London was, shall we say, “a little surprising”. It brought condemnation from Jewish groups; sponsors withdrew; and a week later the Home Office barred Ye from entry into the UK, prompting the cancellation of the entire festival.

Notoriety sells

Industry insiders were shocked by this sudden unravelling of a major event, said Eamonn Forde and Sarah Walker in the same paper – but were also puzzled as to why its organiser, Festival Republic, had risked booking Ye in the first place. Well, festivals are big business these days, said Zing Tsjeng in The i Paper – and notoriety sells. Festival Republic must have looked at Ye’s still-healthy streaming figures, and his ability to court outrage, and seen dollar signs.

Their own defence, however, was that Ye’s antisemitic actions could be overlooked because they were attributable to his bipolar disorder, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. In January, the rapper had taken out an ad in The Wall Street Journal, in which he explained that he had been in the grip of a long manic episode, and insisted that he loved Jewish people. He sounded sincere, but he placed the ad shortly before announcing a world tour; and it made no mention of his long history of spewing antisemitic hatred.

In 2022, he publicly praised Hitler, and tweeted that he’d be going “death con 3” on Jews. He apologised then too – yet neither he nor his staff seem to have taken steps to prevent a public recurrence. He didn’t record and release “Heil Hitler” alone. He wasn’t printing his swastika merchandise in his shed. A manager with power of attorney could have stopped it.

‘Glamour of the censored’

I don’t really buy the mental health defence, said Ella Whelan in The Telegraph. If Ye doesn’t hate Jews, he uses Jew hatred to get attention. But I still think the government was wrong to ban him. That only lends him the glamour of the censored.

Many Britons will have applauded the decision that Ye’s presence would not be “conducive to the public good”, said Sarah McLaughlin on UnHerd; but do we really want ministers to filter visitors to the UK on the basis of their opinions? Banning them won’t make their offensive ideas go away; and it’s a power to limit free speech that could easily be misused.

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

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

Migrating zebras and noisy elephants

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

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

Starlit sleepovers and birds of the delta

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

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

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

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

Magical hiking in the Tsodilo Hills

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

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

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

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

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

Kent: Barming Place, Barming

A magnificent Grade II* Georgian house set in approx. 1.5 acres of gardens. Built in 1768, it boasts a striking red-brick facade and plenty of period features, including a stone balustrade and elegant stone detailing, as well as a roof terrace with views over the Kent Weald. 7 beds (1 with terrace), 4 baths, kitchen, 5 receps, office, workshop, swimming pool, sauna, garden, parking. £2.35 million; Inigo.

Yorkshire: The Old Brook House, Bellerby

A fine Grade II country house built in 1732, which sits close to the Yorkshire Dales National Park. 5 beds, 3 baths, kitchen/breakfast room, 3 receps, garden, workshop, garages. £995,000; Strutt & Parker.

Gloucestershire: Dover House, Painswick

Handsome Grade II* house built in 1720, with atmospheric period interiors featuring intricate rococo scrollwork. 4 beds, 2 baths, kitchen, 2 receps, garden. £1.1 million; Inigo.

Cumbria: Fiddleback Farm, West Woodside

This remarkable circular Grade II* farmhouse is nestled in just over 8.5 acres of mature gardens. 5 beds, 5 baths, kitchen/ dining room, 3 receps, garden, outbuilding, parking. £750,000; Finest Properties.

Salisbury: Ark Farm, Old Wardour

A charming Grade II house in an idyllic rural setting within the historic grounds of Old Wardour Castle. Set on a lake with views of the old and new castle. 7 beds, 2 baths, kitchen/ breakfast room, 2 receps, 3-bed self- contained annexe, studio, garage, garden. £2.4 million; Strutt & Parker.

Norfolk: The Tasburgh Hall Estate, Tasburgh

A superb country estate with a neo-Jacobean manor dating back to the 18th century. 7 beds, 6 baths, kitchen, 4 receps, 4-bed guest/leisure wing, 2-bed gatehouse, fishing lake, tennis court, garden, parking. £2.75 million; Sowerbys.

Nottinghamshire: Papplewick Hall, Papplewick

This Grade I Georgian house has an impressively ornate interior and a cantilevered staircase. 8 beds, 5 baths, kitchen, 4 receps, 4 cottages with a further 11 bedrooms (let on Assured Shorthold Tenancies), tennis court, paddocks, gardens of approx. 10.47 acres, parking. £2.5 million; Strutt & Parker.

Carmarthenshire: Pant y Ffynnon, Llanfynydd

A charming country house built c.1796, and set in approx. 12.5 acres surrounded by verdant rolling hills. 4 beds, 2 baths (1 en suite), kitchen, 3 receps, garden, parking. £815,000; Inigo.

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

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

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

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

Serpentine North, London W2. Until 23 August

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

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

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

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

‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939)

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

‘The Dark Crystal’ (1982)

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

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

‘The NeverEnding Story’ (1984)

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

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

‘Labyrinth’ (1986)

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

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

‘The Princess Bride’ (1987)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ (2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chessington World of Adventures Resort, Surrey

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

chessington.com

Paultons Park, Hampshire

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

paultonspark.co.uk

Alton Towers, Staffordshire

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

altontowers.com

Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Lancashire

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

blackpoolpleasurebeach.com

Appearing straight out of science fiction, portable computers called cyberdecks have been growing in popularity, especially among Gen Z. They can be built with minimal parts and customized both in their purpose and aesthetic. The trend is a response to a perceived lack of creativity in mainstream technology, as well as a way to fight back against data harvesting. And many want to use technology without the influence of large corporations, similar to the days of the early internet.

From mind to machine

A cyberdeck is a transportable, homemade computer “used to access an online interface,” said Daily Dot. The term originated with the 1984 sci-fi novel “Neuromancer” by William Gibson. And since then, cyberdecks have been a “staple of the cyberpunk genre and aesthetic.” Building them has become a trend among Gen Z, blending “retro-futuristic aesthetics with practical computing,” said Newsweek.

Cyberdecks are generally simple to construct, often using “single-board systems like Raspberry Pi paired with small screens, keyboards and custom enclosures,” said Newsweek. Many are also “built from thrifted or repurposed materials, giving each device a distinct look and function shaped entirely by its creator.”

These hand-built computers serve a variety of purposes, including gaming machine, e-reader, information database or MP3 player. And building a cyberdeck “can be as complex or simple as you choose to make it,” said The Cyberdeck Cafe. “People of all skill levels have constructed their own.”

Cyberdecks are “open systems, meaning components can be swapped, modified or redesigned,” said Newsweek. The flexibility is “part of the appeal for younger users who want to experiment with hardware and software without restrictions.”

The trend comes at a time when technology and social media platforms have become controlling with “more data harvesting, more algorithmic control, more ads, more surveillance,” said Quasa. Cyberdecks are “less about replacing everyday devices and more about reclaiming control over technology,” said Newsweek.

Sticking it to the man

Building a portable computer is a “way fringe and anti-establishment engineers and cyberpunks are creating a digital identity all their own,” said Daily Dot. Cyberdecks “combat the unbounded corporatization, invasiveness and homogeneity of widespread tech, in addition to individualizing the tech experience according to a user’s aesthetic.”

They are “quietly rebellious” and a “direct middle finger to the boring, minimalist ‘everything-is-a-sleek-black-rectangle’ aesthetic that dominates tech design,” said Quasa. Much of the love for cyberdecks is a result of disillusionment with the state of modern technology. The “early internet’s wild, private, joyful chaos feels like a distant memory.” Gone is the world in which “you didn’t chase likes or dread the next feed update.”

While technology has been “shaping the world’s digital future,” cyberdecks are “driving users back to the past — a time when a simpler, less corporatized and aggressively monitored online reality once existed,” said Daily Dot. The trend is “self-defense and nostalgia at the same time,” said Quasa. “When you are making something that’s truly yours, why be boring? Make it fun. Make it ridiculous. Make it you.”

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

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

Why stay here?

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

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

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

Eating and drinking

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

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

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

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

Things to do

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

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

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

The verdict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Szalay was “praised by the judges for its originality” when his pared-back novel, “Flesh”, scooped the Booker Prize last year, said The Times. “Yet some readers have found it strangely familiar.”

Critics have noticed “striking similarities” between “Flesh” and Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film “Barry Lyndon”, which itself is adapted from William Thackeray’s 1844 novel. While some are “flummoxed” by Szalay’s reluctance to acknowledge the extent of the parallels, others are convinced he is “playing a game with readers, sending them on a literary treasure hunt”.

‘Near-identical trajectories’

With its “sparse prose” and constant repetition of the word ‘OK’, the British-Hungarian author’s novel caused quite a stir when it won the 2025 Booker Prize, said The Independent. The awards chair, Roddy Doyle, said the panel of judges had “never read anything quite like it”.

The rags-to-riches tale begins in Hungary, where 15-year-old Istvan lives with his mother in a housing estate. While the eponymous lead in “Barry Lyndon” hails from Ireland, the characters “follow near-identical trajectories: they enlist in the army, marry wealthy women, grieve their sons and clash with their stepsons, and lose everything they have earned later in their lives”.

Despite the almost indistinguishable plot, few critics pointed this out when “Flesh” won the Booker Prize. One of the first to note the similarities was writer Aled Maclean-Jones who in November 2025 described “Flesh” as “quite clearly a near beat-for-beat mirror” both of Thackeray’s novel and Kubrick’s movie, “to such a level I’d almost call it a retelling”, in a post on Substack.

“Szalay has the whole plot, the entire arc, supplied to him”, said David Sexton in The Standard. “There is nothing remotely wrong about it. It’s not plagiarism. Indeed it could be considered a vital tribute to a fantastic film”.

Reader ‘sleuthing’

When Szalay appeared on Dua Lipa’s “Service95 Book Club” podcast he listed five books including “Hamlet” and Virginia Woolf’s “Jacob’s Room” as having influenced “Flesh”, said The Independent. But he made no mention of Thackeray’s novel or Kubrick’s film.

Asked directly whether he had “Barry Lyndon” in mind when writing “Flesh”, he told Anthony Cummins in The Observer that he had seen the film when he was 20, “and the rags-to-riches arc was an influence”.

But in an episode of BBC Radio 4’s “This Cultural Life” due to air this week, Szalay “downplays the connection”, said The Times. When asked about whether the film is a “direct reference”, the author tells host John Wilson, “No, I wouldn’t go that far”, adding “Kubrick wasn’t really at the front of my mind, I don’t think.”

“I don’t understand why, at this stage, he won’t own up to it more”, Sexton told The Times. But Cummins had his own theory. “I think he is more artful than people are willing to credit”, he told the newspaper. The similarities could be “more akin to ‘Easter eggs’ in films, hidden messages for fans” to try and find. Perhaps he feels, “‘Why spoil it by talking people through the book in that way?’ There’s fun for the reader in sleuthing”.

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

The Camargue, France

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

Andalusia, Spain

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

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

Folegandros, Greece

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

Transylvania, Romania

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

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

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

‘Cosmos’ (1980)

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

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

‘The Blue Planet’ (2001)

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

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

‘Planet Earth’ (2006)

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

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

‘Frozen Planet’ (2011)

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

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

‘Wonders of the Universe’ (2011)

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

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

‘Africa’ (2013)

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

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

‘The Hunt’ (2015)

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

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

‘Our Planet’ (2019-2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The smallest and most westerly of the seven main Canary Islands, El Hierro is young, in geological terms – a mere 1.2 million years old – and its volcanic landscape is far less lush than those of its nearest neighbours, La Palma and La Gomera, said Ben Ross in The Telegraph.

Still, if “bleakly fascinating” sounds appealing, and you’re fit enough to handle some quite steep paths, the island makes for “wonderful” hiking. El Hierro is sparsely populated and has no international airport – most visitors arrive by ferry or on a small plane from Tenerife – and while Tenerife welcomed seven million visitors in 2024, El Hierro saw just 26,000, the vast majority of whom were Spanish. I visited on a week-long, self-guided walking tour with Inntravel, which includes accommodation – at, among other places, the island’s state-run Parador and the Balneario Pozo de la Salud, a “delightful” small seaside hotel.

The most “impressive” hike took us (in seven hours) from El Mocanal to La Frontera, and granted “epic” views of the El Golfo plains and the caldera of the Fireba volcano, where clouds “pour over the spine of the island in waves”. El Hierro’s peaks rise to 1,501 metres and the microclimates on their upper slopes sustain contrasting areas of vegetation, including giant heather trees, pine forests and plantations of prickly pears. More striking still, however, is the grove of twisted junipers “crouched” like abstract sculptures on the hillside above the isolated village of Sabinosa.

Each day we came across “new peculiarities”, including tracks where the rock “swirled with molten shapes like hot toffee”, and the badlands of the Punta de la Dehesa, a “brutal” landscape formed by an eruption in 1793. And although the island’s “giant” lizards were slightly disappointing (they grow to only 70cm long), encounters with flocks of canaries (“drabber” than their captive cousins, but just as “charming”) made up for that.

The trip costs from £820pp, excluding flights (inntravel.co.uk).

This is an incredibly quick way to get your spicy-oily noodle kick, said chef and Japanese-cookery fan Tim Anderson. Three ingredients, about five minutes of cooking, and the flavour is like pizza, in udon form. Embellish it however you like: it’s nice with spinach, mushrooms or artichoke hearts.

Ingredients (serves 2)

• 75g ’nduja
• 1 heaped tsp fennel seeds
• 2 portions udon noodles, par-cooked according to the packet instructions
• a few leaves of fresh basil (optional, to serve)
• grated Parmesan (optional, to serve)

Method

• Place the ’nduja in a frying pan set over a medium-high heat.
• Break it up into small chunks and, when it starts to melt into a scary red puddle, add the fennel seeds and let things sizzle for 1-2 minutes.
• Add the par-cooked udon and sauté for a few minutes to coat the noodles (a splash of the udon cooking water, or just tap water, may help to liquefy the ’nduja and form a sauce).
• Dish up and garnish with basil and grated parmesan, if you’ve got it.

Taken from JapanEasy Kitchen: Simple Recipes Using Japanese Pantry Ingredients by Tim Anderson

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