Table of contents for 1534 in The Week

What happened Le Pen convicted Marine Le Pen’s hopes of becoming France’s next president were dealt a potentially fatal blow on Monday, when the far-right leader was convicted of embezzlement and banned from running for office for five years. National Rally’s three-time presidential candidate – who had been the frontrunner to win the 2027 election – was fined €100,000 and given a four-year sentence: two years under house arrest and two years suspended. She has already appealed the verdict, which she slammed as “political”. Populist figures around the world, including Elon Musk and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, were quick to rally in support. “When the radical Left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents,” said Musk, who also warned that this would “backfire”. Le…

Controversy of the week Trump’s “liberation day” “This is going to hurt,” said Steven Swinford in The Times. The world was braced on Wednesday for “liberation day”, when President Trump was expected to announce his long-threatened, sweeping global tariffs. As The Week went to press, Trump’s measures had not been announced. Likely scenarios ranged from reciprocal tariffs on the so-called “Dirty 15” (the top 15% of countries that have the worst trade imbalances with the US, which include the UK), to a blanket 10-20% tariff on all imports. The lead-up to liberation day was mired in the usual Trumpian chaos, said The Economist: even top White House officials seemed unsure what the boss would do. But given his existing 25% car levy, and measures against Mexico, Canada and China, it’s…

Buskers, after their use of repetitive amplified music was likened to “psychological torture” by a judge, as he ordered Westminster City Council to tackle the nuisance. The case had been brought by Global Radio, which said staff in its offices on Leicester Square had had to work in cupboards to get away from the racket. MPs, who faced calls for tighter restrictions on their expenses, after it emerged that Taiwo Owatemi, Labour MP for Coventry North West, had been able to claim £900 for her dog’s “rent” – a pet surcharge imposed by the landlord of her London home.…

British men are twice as likely as women to have cycled within the past three months, at 30% compared with 15%. Nine out of ten women are afraid of cycling in towns and cities. Cycling UK; Swapfiets 48% of workers say they‘d consider handing in their notice if they were forced back into the workplace on a full-time basis. Hybrid working is now the pattern for 77% of the workforce, according to the poll, with 25% of those surveyed spending three days per week in the workplace. Hays/The Guardian Only 21% of people are happy with how the NHS is working, a historic low as measured by an annual poll, and down from 24% in 2023. The King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust/BSA…

My father, George Orwell Richard Blair didn’t have the smoothest start in life, says Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. At three weeks old, he was adopted; and nine months later, his adoptive mother, Eileen, died aged 39. Fortunately, his father Eric – better known as George Orwell – was, by the standards of the time, a doting, hands-on dad. He and Eileen had wanted children but were infertile; and Orwell wasn’t about to give up his only child. “My father was devoted to me,” says Richard. “Absolutely devoted.” Already suffering from the tuberculosis that was to kill him, the writer took Richard to live on the Isle of Jura in Scotland, with a nanny and his own younger sister, Avril. There were no other children there and Orwell was often…

How many settlers are there? Some 737,000 Israelis now live on land designated by the UN as Palestinian. About 500,000 of these reside in the West Bank; the rest are in East Jerusalem. This means that around 10% of Israel’s Jewish population resides in settlements deemed by the UN Security Council, most recently in 2016, to have “no legal validity, constituting a flagrant violation under international law”. Palestinian residents of the West Bank – an area less than half the size of Northern Ireland on the western side of the River Jordan – who now number 3.3 million, have lived at least partly under Israeli control since 1967: scores of settlements dot the area, from north to south; some 800 Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks limit the movement of Palestinians living…

During his 32 years working at Ford Motors in Detroit, Mike O’Brien amassed a list of 2,229 mixed metaphors and malapropisms blurted out by his co-workers. And in February, in an email announcing his retirement, he finally circulated his full list of “flubs” around the company. Examples include “It’s no skin on our back”; “We’re dancing on thin ice”; “Read between the tea leaves”; “Too many cooks in the soup”; “I don’t want to sound like a broken drum here, but…”; and “Let’s not reinvent the ocean.” A Japanese inventor has resurrected his ambition to revolutionise the bathtub. In 1970, Eiji Yamaya was part of a team behind the “Ultrasonic Bath”, designed to clean users with ultrasonic waves and rubber “massage balls” (pictured). The idea never quite caught on; but…

POLAND Blame Putin for the return of killing fields Frankfurter Rundschau (Frankfurt) When more than 120 countries signed up to the Ottawa Treaty against the use of landmines in 1997, we took “a step closer to a better world”, says Jakob Maurer: those heartbreaking images of children maimed by mines in Cambodia, Angola and Afghanistan would hopefully be a thing of the past. Sadly, though, that better world was a fantasy: Poland, Finland and the Baltic states are now preparing to withdraw from the treaty and turn huge swaths of Nato’s eastern border into permanent “killing fields”, in a bid to protect themselves from the growing threat from Russia. You might argue that it’s politically and morally “outrageous”: landmines are “weapons of industrial slaughter” that have caused decades of death…

A daily pill that is designed to allow dogs to live longer, healthier lives could soon become available in the US. Designed by the San Francisco-based biotech firm Loyal, the drug, LOY-002, aims to give pets at least another year of healthy life by inhibiting insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), a hormone that plays a role in cell growth and survival, and which is found in higher levels in larger dogs (which tend to have shorter lifespans). Previous studies have shown that fasting leads to lower levels of IGF-1, better metabolic function and longer life. The drug apparently has a similar effect, without having to control the animal’s calorie intake. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US has already said there is a “reasonable expectation” that LOY-002 will…

Prince Harry was just 20 when he visited Lesotho during his gap year, said Tessa Dunlop in The Independent. His adolescence had been turbulent and self-destructive, but in the tiny landlocked country he found “meaning” and purpose. Two years later, he and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho founded Sentebale – a charity dedicated to orphans of the Aids epidemic – in memory of their late mothers. The cause was clearly very close to Harry’s heart, and he raised millions for it; so “no one was surprised” when Sentebale (which translates as “forget me not”, his mother’s favourite flower) remained in the Sussexes’ portfolio after they left the UK. Last week, however, Harry revealed that he had made the “devastating” decision to stand down as its patron, in solidarity with its trustees.…

“Farewell, Just Stop Oil – you won’t be missed,” said Tom Slater in The Spectator. The “soup-throwing, handgluing”climate activists have announced that they are ending their direct action campaign, because their demand for an end to new oil and gas licences has become government policy. This, they say, makes theirs among “the most successful civil-resistance campaigns in recent history”. It’s nonsense, of course. If anything, the group’s “comically posh” members turned the public against their cause with their pointless stunts – hurling soup at works of art and blocking roads, making people late for work or hospital appointments. Climate zealotry won’t disappear with JSO’s departure: groups such as Youth Demand are already vying to succeed them. “But at least we’ll be spared their blood-pressure-raising am-dram antics, if only for a…

Emma Raducanu’s confidence took a battering early this year, when she endured a “rough run of form” and suffered three consecutive first-round defeats, said Tumaini Carayol in The Guardian. But at the Miami Open last week, the British 22-year-old put together arguably the best run of her career outside her triumph at the 2021 US Open. For the first time in a WTA 1000 tournament, she won four matches in a row, beating world No. 10 Emma Navarro en route to the quarter-finals – where for two and a half hours she “went toe-to-toe with Jessica Pegula”, the world No. 4, before succumbing 6-4, 6-7, 6-2. Across her four matches, Raducanu played with a “freedom and confidence” that has all too often been lacking – and her run means that…

The US and the EU To The Guardian You report that White House top dogs described their “loathing of European free-loading” in a group chat on Signal. The subject of the chat was plans for US attacks on the Houthis to protect shipping lanes in the Red Sea. In early 2014, Victoria Nuland (then Barack Obama’s assistant secretary of state) was heard saying, “F**k the EU,” to Geoffrey Pyatt (the US ambassador to Ukraine), in a bugged phone conversation about the crisis in Ukraine that led to the Maidan Revolution. It seems that Europe’s approach to the election that saw a pro-West president replace a pro-Russia one was not hawkish enough for then US tastes. What’s new, I suppose, is the medium through which these sentiments are communicated. What’s not…

Running time: 2hrs 30mins Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest “really ought to be unstageable”, said Patrick Marmion in the Daily Mail. The film is about a slick Manhattan ad man who’s mistaken for a spy, and pursued across America in a chase that features trains, planes and automobiles, and culminates on the summit of Mount Rushmore. But all this proves to be “just grist to the mill of director Emma Rice in her effortlessly chic new adaptation”. It shares some DNA with Patrick Barlow’s stage version of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, said Ron Simpson on What’s on Stage. There’s the same “madcap switching of parts”, clever use of props, and breaches of the fourth wall. “What it does not share is the comedy of incompetence.” On the contrary,…

“Months of scientific analysis and dogged detective work” have revealed that behind an abstract painting by Joan Miró lurks, long undetected, a portrait of the artist’s mother, says Sam Jones in The Guardian. The Catalan surrealist painted Pintura (pictured, top) between 1925 and 1927, while he was experimenting with avant-garde styles he had encountered in Paris – and also “comprehensively dashing his parents’ hopes that he might one day find stable employment as an accounts clerk”. His decision to paint over a rather conventional portrait of his mother Dolores (pictured, bottom) may have “a deeper, hidden meaning”, reflecting his attempt to break away from “the bourgeois constraints of his family” and from traditional artistic styles. At the time, Miró was on a quest, as he famously described it, to “assassinate…

As the Maliks return home, Lynda is cheered that Khalil will return to feed the llamas. Emma’s campaigning might threaten her place on the parish council, but she’s not worried; Robert urges Mick to drop his complaint against her. At the Dairy, Helen and Pat interview Clarrie and Susan for the job, with surprising results. Lynda and Robert discover llama Constanza has died; Khalil arrives and is worried it was his fault. As Joy and Mick move back into Beechwood, they find Rochelle there – she wants to stay for a while. Khalil opens up to Lynda about his illness. Joy tells Mick about a dark episode during Rochelle’s childhood and its effect on their relationship. At the parish council meeting, Mick makes a speech withdrawing his complaint and extolling…

Chefs as content creators Time was when a chef’s “content” was limited to what he or she put on the pass, says Jimi Famurewa in The Observer. Not any more: a growing number are now creating social media content in an effort to thrive in “an increasingly brutal trading environment”. Take Fallow, in central London – a restaurant that does 5,200 covers a week. You might have thought this would be enough for its chefs; but every Monday, co-founders Will Murray and Jack Croft spend hours recording “attention-grabbing videos” with titles such as “This Is Why Fish Tastes Better in Restaurants”, and “We Found the Best Scrambled Egg Method”. The videos are entertaining, but also educational. Many offer “technical dish breakdowns”, or demystify the business in other ways: for one…

New cars: what the critics say Volkswagen ID.7 Price: from £51,580 What Car? Volkswagen’s electric ID.7 hatchback is its flagship executive car – a polished long-distance cruiser. The entry-level Pro has a single 282bhp motor, a 77kWh battery, and takes 6.5secs to do 0-62mph, with an official range of 384 miles. The Pro S can do 436 miles, but with a heavier 86kWh battery, 0-62 takes 6.6secs. The GTX has an extra motor for 335bhp, so it takes 5.4secs for 0-62, but the range is 365 miles. Top Gear Magazine The ID.7 – which also comes in an estate version called the Tourer – is built to be as aerodynamic as possible, and the low drag helps on motorways, with noise “impressively subdued”. It’s not exactly sporty, but it is…

Oddbox takes odd fruit and veg deemed too ugly for supermarkets and boxes them up for delivery in London and beyond. Boxes can be personalised, and come in a range of sizes (from £13.49; oddbox.co.uk). Who Gives A Crap offers subscriptions for recycled or bamboo loo paper, and donates 50% of profits to projects bringing clean water and WCs to communities without them (from £28; uk.whogivesacrap.org). Get ethically sourced coffee delivered regularly to your home or office with the “carbon negative” company Kiss the Hippo. You can adjust the weight, blend and frequency of orders, and choose from bags or pods (from £10; kissthehippo.com). Dental hygiene is covered with Brushbox, which has an annual subscription for its bamboo toothbrushes, eco-friendly toothpaste and plastic-free floss. For every brush sold, Brushbox donates…

The George Hathersage, Derbyshire A fictionalised version of this old coaching inn appears in Jane Eyre, and Charlotte Brontë is said to have written parts of the novel in its Lady C. Brontë suite. Set in the pretty village of Hathersage, it recently underwent a thorough refurb, says Helen Ochyra in The Times, and makes a “homely” base for exploring the Peak District. Rooms have decor with “a contemporary flair”, and some have extra sofa beds sleeping “multiple children”. The restaurant serves “wholesome” pub-style meals, including plant-based dishes, and there’s a “gorgeous” 1930s lido a short walk away. Doubles from £120 b&b; thegeorgehathersage.com.…

UK business: eye-watering costs A new survey from the Institute of Directors finds that just “one in ten business leaders” are optimistic about the UK economy. Who can blame them, asked Ali Lyon in City AM. If April is scheduled to be “awful” for consumers, businesses are braced for an “eyewatering” rise in overheads as measures from the October Budget come into force. Hikes to the minimum wage and a £25bn rise in employers’ national insurance contributions coincide with rises in wholesale energy prices and water bills, as well as reforms to business rates. Jane Gratton of the British Chambers of Commerce warned “the operating environment was likely to get worse still” – amid “rampant uncertainty around trade conditions” and further cost pressures, including the forthcoming Employment Rights Bill and…

Aid’s grim counter-revolution Adam Tooze Financial Times Development policy is going through “a grim and largely silent counter-revolution”, says Adam Tooze. USAID has been dismembered, and the latest to put the aid budget “on the chopping block” – joining Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands – is Germany. “In a worst-case scenario, global aid budgets could be slashed by a staggering $74bn in 2025 alone”, equating to around 30% of total overseas development assistance (ODA). At a time when the poorest countries are labouring under excessive debts, this is a disaster: “millions of lives are at risk as major public health programmes are rolled back”. Cuts to aid budgets are often seen as “collateral damage” of “budgetary austerity and the new priority – rearmament”. What happened to the “holistic common…

Millions of households faced a steep rise in their living costs this week owing to a raft of price hikes dubbed “Awful April”. On 1 April, council tax rose by 5% in most of England; water bills are going up by £123 per year on average in England and Wales; and many households will face higher energy bills too, owing to a 6.4% rise in the price cap. With the cost of broadband and mobile phone contracts also rising, the flurry of price hikes was predicted to add hundreds of pounds a year to the average household’s bills. To compound the sense of economic gloom, analysts issued dire warnings about the potential impact on British jobs of Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs (see page 6). They also noted that the…

The fashion retailer H&M is creating lifelike AI “twins” of 30 leading models, which it will use in its social media and marketing imagery. The AI reproductions would only be used with permission, and the agreement allows models to book their “twins” into shoots for other brands – enabling them to be in two places at once, effectively. Model Mathilda Gvarliani described her twin as “like me, but without the jet lag”. A new trend for the wealthy to “engage with mass consumption while retaining exclusivity” has been exemplified by a clutch bag carried by Lauren Sánchez, the ex-journalist engaged to Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. The Balenciaga bag costs £4,350 and is made of calfskin, but looks exactly like a reusable coffee cup.…

Birmingham City Council declared a major incident on Monday, stating that a strike by rubbish collectors and the blocking of depots by picket lines had led to 17,000 tonnes of uncollected rubbish accumulating across the city. Residents have reported that huge piles of bin bags are attracting rats. Declaring a major incident means that the council can deploy an extra 35 bin lorries and crews, and seek support from other authorities. Rubbish collectors have been striking since January in a dispute over job restructuring plans, which the Unite union says will reduce pay for 70-76 workers; the council disputes the figures. An indefinite all out strike began in March.…

Amsterdam Mass stabbing: The man suspected of wounding five people during a knife rampage in central Amsterdam last week has been identified by police as a 30-year-old Ukrainian national from the Russian-occupied eastern region of Donetsk. Named only as Roman D, the knifeman attacked as he wandered through the narrow streets near Dam Square on Thursday afternoon, seemingly choosing victims at random. A British tourist, who’d seen what was happening, sprinted after him, knocked him down and kept him pinned to the ground until police arrived. He has since received a medal for bravery from the city’s mayor, but has asked to remain anonymous. The victims of the stabbing were three women and two men aged between 19 and 73. The suspect, who had false ID papers, had checked into…

1 Dancing in the Dark, written and performed by Bruce Springsteen 2* Carey, written and performed by Joni Mitchell 3 Shauri Yako by Nguashi N’timbo, performed by Orchestra Super Mazembe 4 Summertime by George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward, performed by Billie Holiday and her Orchestra 5 Hurricane, written by Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy, performed by Bob Dylan 6 The Butterfly Lovers’ Violin Concerto: Andante cantabile “Transformation” by He Zhanhao and Chen Gang, performed by Lü Siqing and the Taipei Chinese Orchestra (cond. Chung Yiu-Kwong 7 Piece of My Heart by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns, performed by Big Brother and the Holding Company 8 Who Knows Where the Time Goes? by Sandy Denny, performed by Fairport Convention Book: Collected Poems by W.H. Auden Luxury: a Tang Dynasty horse * Choice if allowed only one record…

Jews have lived in the West Bank for millennia; the area is seen as the cradle of Jewish civilisation and is designated by Israel as Judea and Samaria, because it covers part of those Biblical Jewish kingdoms. But in 1947, when the UN split the mandate of Palestine, its population was largely Arab. The UN gave 56% of the whole mandate area to the new Jewish state, and 43%, including the West Bank, for the new Palestinian state. Arab leaders rejected the plan, and Israel was attacked by its neighbours. The fighting drove some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes (known as the Nakba, “catastrophe”); large numbers of Jews were also displaced, including from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In 1949, an armistice line, the Green Line, was agreed: it…

Isolation won’t Make America Great Again Editorial National Review “I just hate bailing out Europe again,” J.D. Vance complained in the infamous group chat leaked last week. There was no need for the US to launch strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, said the vice-president, given that far more European than US cargo passes through the Suez Canal. “I think we are making a mistake,” Vance declared. Wrong, says an editorial in National Review. First, it’s not true that America is doing all the work here: several strikes against the Houthis have been joint US-UK efforts. Nor, as Vance implied, is defending international shipping “some kind of plot hatched by globalist utopians in the 1990s”. It’s a time-honoured US practice that goes back to the Founders. The “shores of Tripoli”…

AI is being used to analyse photos of suspicious moles, enabling patients to be checked for possible skin cancer without seeing a specialist doctor. About half-a-million people are referred for urgent skin cancer checks each year in the UK. These involve a face-to-face examination by a consultant dermatologist and take about 20 minutes. But at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London, patients are now being seen by a medical photographer who uses an iPhone with a magnifying lens to take pictures of the concerning moles, which are then analysed in seconds by the app. The whole process takes five minutes. Nearly half of patients get the all-clear and are discharged; the others are then referred to a specialist. Trials show that the software is 99.9% accurate…

If the story of Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine’s arrest had broken a few days later, “you’d think it was an April Fool”, said Toby Young in The Times. In late January, six uniformed police officers turned up at their house in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire. They detained them in front of their three-year-old daughter, then took them to a police station and locked them in a cell for 11 hours. The reason for all this? Their elder daughter’s primary school, Cowley Hill, had lodged a complaint after the couple criticised its recruiting process for the new head. The school also complained that the pair had been “casting aspersions” on the chair of governors in a WhatsApp group. “Instead of telling the school that this was not a police matter – or,…

“Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.”William Makepeace Thackeray, quoted in Forbes “The only way to get 30 minutes’ uninterrupted rest in a hospital is to ring for a nurse.”Southern saying, ibid “Follow your dreams, not your boyfriends.”Gillian Anderson, quoted on The Knowledge “It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor, whom it can help, and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help.”C.S. Lewis, quoted in The New York Times “There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out…

A Welsh rout The impressive start made by England’s women’s rugby team in the Six Nations continued in the second round on Saturday, as they followed up their victory over Italy by crushing Wales 67-12, said Sarah Rendell in The Observer. In her 50th cap for the Red Roses, Ellie Kildunne “scored a whirlwind hat-trick in the space of nine minutes” in the second half. Meg Jones, who has recently suffered the loss of both her parents, was also highly impressive, and capped her performance with a “phenomenal solo try”. And there were two tries for “sevens star Abi Burton, who made her England debut from the bench”. In all, England scored 11 tries. They’ve now won 31 matches in a row in the tournament – and on this evidence,…

To The Times It is not for publicly funded police forces to enter the fray between dissatisfied parents and offended primary schools. If a school does not like what its parents are saying, then it can simply block undesired emails, or it can make its case to a civil judge and ask for an injunction to be granted, if it can establish sufficient grounds. However, seeking the arrest of parents for the (perhaps excessive and vociferous) care for their children is not appropriate: it merely adds cost to the public purse and grist to J.D. Vance’s mill when he talks about civil liberties in the UK. I would hate to think that he is right. Timothy Young KC, London To The Times My reaction to this case was one of…

Ravel: Fragments (Bertrand Chamayou) Erato £13.50 Bertrand Chamayou’s 2016 recording of Maurice Ravel’s complete solo music established the French pianist as a great interpreter of his countryman’s work, said James McCarthy in Gramophone. Released to mark the 150th anniversary of Ravel’s birth, Chamayou’s new album looks at the composer from a different angle. As well as piano arrangements of Ravel’s orchestral music, Fragments includes Chamayou’s own arrangements of songs, plus tributes to Ravel composed by near-contemporaries (such as Joaquín Nin, Ricardo Viñes, Xavier Montsalvatge and Arthur Honegger), as well as more recent composers. “The most ravishing of those later pieces” is Salvatore Sciarrino’s De la Nuit, said Andrew Clements in The Guardian – an “intoxicating mashup of themes” from the Ondine and Scarbo movements of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. In…

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, 1961 (Vintage £9.99). I would need to live several lives before I’d have the insight to write this. A collapsing marriage – the resentment, the longing for more, the imagined conversations – and the shattering of the American Dream in 1950s suburbia. This shook my soul. Foster by Claire Keegan, 2010 (Faber £9.99). Claire Keegan’s writing is spare, small scale. She leads you into what you think is a small world – a young girl is taken to stay with a childless couple while her mother has another baby – but it’s a huge world where love brings hope and disappointments are made bearable. A perfect novel. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, 1991 (HarperCollins £10.99). Sisters in Iowa fight over the inheritance of their…

Programmes Reunion New thriller. Leaving prison after ten years, Daniel is bent on revenge, until a reunion with his estranged daughter forces a change of plan. Mon 7-Tue 8 Apr, BBC1 21:00 (60mins each). What They Found Sam Mendes directs this documentary film about two members of the British Army’s Photographic Unit who were present at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. It uses recordings of their accounts and footage they shot. Mon 7 Apr, BBC2 22:00 (40mins). Kinahan: The True Story of Ireland’s Mafia Four-part series charting the crime family’s rise from Dublin street-dealers to notorious cartel. Tue 8 Apr, BBC1 22:40 and 23:40 (60mins each). Ride or Die Documentary following three motorcycle riders as they prepare for one of the sport’s most dangerous events, Northern Ireland’s North West 200. Thur 10 Apr,…

Whipped ricotta and asparagus bruschetta Serves 4 200g ricotta zest and juice of ½ lemon 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil 2 × 250g bunches of asparagus 4 slices of bread, toasted sea salt and freshly ground black pepper • Put the ricotta, zest and juice, 1 tbsp of the oil, a sprinkle of salt and a generous grind of pepper into a bowl. Whisk until smooth and light. • Snap the woody ends off the asparagus, then cut them into 1cm rounds. Fill a bowl with cold water and ice and set aside. • Bring a large saucepan of well salted water to the boil, then drop in the asparagus pieces and cook for about a minute. You want them to remain crunchy, so be careful not to overcook them.…

SOURCES: THE DAILY TELEGRAPH/WHAT HI-FI?…

Richard Chamberlain 1934-2025 Richard Chamberlain, who has died aged 90, made his name in the early 1960s playing the “sensitive young hospital medic” Dr. Kildare in the TV series of that name, said The Daily Telegraph. He was 27 years old and it was his first significant role, but the show – co-starring veteran actor Raymond Massey as Kildare’s gruff mentor – proved a massive hit, and made him a star: it was said that Chamberlain received more fan mail during Dr. Kildare’s five-year run (from 1961 to 1966) than Clark Gable had at his career peak. Its theme song (which Chamberlain sang) became a chart hit, and the merchandising included a range of Dr. Kildare dolls. Over time, however, Chamberlain came to resent being identified with the clean-cut doctor,…

The Chancellor wants Britain to become a “defence industrial superpower” – which, one assumes, “will involve using much more steel”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. Bad timing, then, that the Chinese owner of Scunthorpe-based British Steel, Jingye, has threatened to close the country’s last two blast furnaces as early as June. Jingye cites an ongoing cash crisis, worsened by US steel tariffs. There are three broad options; none looks attractive. The Government could offer more support than the reported £500m so far, to underwrite the planned switch to a greener electric arc furnace. Even riskier, it could allow the blast furnaces to close and hope another steelmaker fills the gap. “The fallback option”, nationalisation, “is not meant to be part of the script”. The tough tactics adopted by British…

Nordic power The best-performing currencies in the G10 are the Swedish krona and the Norwegian krone – up by a respective 10% and 8% against the US dollar so far this year, said Mari Novik in the FT. It’s partly because investors are betting on “a higher path for interest rates in Scandinavian countries” (Norway’s remain stuck at a 17-year high of 4.5%), but also due to an increasingly popular Forex punt. Traders reckon the krona and krone are perfectly positioned for “a tailwind from the major spending push promised by Germany and other big economies”. As Bank of America FX strategist Kamal Sharma put it, “the Scandi currencies are simply the euro on steroids”. Brisk trade is also being boosted by Sweden’s large defence sector and Norway’s steel and…

Charles Stewart The Sotheby’s boss reckons that “the cracks and fissures in a formerly globalised world” could be rather good for the auction house, said Matthew Garrahan in the FT – at least in terms of identity. Before Brexit and Trump, the art and high-end collectibles markets had become “global” and “samey”. “You would see the same things in Hong Kong, London, New York, Paris.” Now he sees “a trend towards regionalisation and even nationalisation” – “I’m not sure that’s entirely a bad thing.” Stewart, who “looks every inch the Morgan Stanley banker” that he was for 20 years, is “the outsider” at Sotheby’s. He joined in 2019, hired by Patrick Drahi, the French-Israeli billionaire, who paid $3.7bn for the business and who pitched him the job on a two-hour…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1459 Two Connell Guides and three Week-branded items will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 14 April. Send it to The Week Crossword 1459, 121-141 Westbourne Terrace, London W2 6JR, or email the completed grid/listed solutions to crossword@theweek.co.uk. This week’s winner will receive Week-branded items, as well as two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 1 Organisation accused falsely? (5) 4 Sort to be disheartened during most skilful financial investigation (5,4) 9 I’m so interfering abroad? (7,8) 10 What Ascot racegoer surely did for woodworking aids (9) 11 What was yours once I then abandoned (5) 12 Plentiful beer cases foremost in merry party (5) 14 Animals hunted by African Emperor unfortunately (7) 17…

A miniature dachshund who went missing on Kangaroo Island in South Australia 16 months ago has been spotted alive in the wild. According to owner Georgia Gardner, Valerie was only six inches tall when she went missing from a campsite, and was a “total princess” who in chilly weather wore a pink jumper to match her pink collar. Yet Valerie has somehow survived for 500 days in the bush, evading predators including black tiger snakes – and attempts to capture her. Two near-life-sized statues have been discovered by archaeologists at Pompeii. They depict a woman, who is believed to be a priestess in a cult devoted to Ceres, the goddess of fertility and agriculture, and a man who may have been her husband. The statues decorated the face of a…

Paul Mescal, with confirmation that he has been cast as Paul McCartney in a series of four new films about The Beatles, directed by Sam Mendes. His fellow Irishman Barry Keoghan will play Ringo Starr, Harris Dickinson will play John Lennon and Joseph Quinn will star as George Harrison. Each of the films, due out in 2028, will focus on a different member of the group. Chester Zoo, which unveiled its much anticipated “Heart of Africa” facility – a sweeping, 22.5 acre expanse of grassland that will be home to 57 African species including vultures, rhino, naked mole-rats and 15,000 locusts. In one area, various species will roam together, as though in the wild. The cashless society, with news that it has had a surprising upside: a fall in the…

The Sentencing Council announced that it would suspend its new guidance for England and Wales hours before it was due to come into force this week. The guidance advised that courts should order a pre-sentence report on offenders if they were from a minority group, young or female; such reports often lead to less severe sentences. Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood had warned that the guidance would create a perception of “two-tier justice”, and had threatened legislation to block it.…

Madison, Wisconsin Musk defeat: In a major boost to Democrats, voters in Wisconsin have elected a liberal judge to the state’s supreme court, following a fiercely contested campaign that broke spending records. State supreme court races are usually relatively quiet affairs, but this one had come to be seen as a referendum on Donald Trump’s second term, and on Elon Musk’s activities. With the court expected to hear key cases on abortion rights, and congressional redistricting that could affect the outcome of the midterms, Musk had ploughed $25m into a campaign to deprive the court of its liberal majority. To boost conservative turnout he’d deployed tactics of dubious legality similar to those he used in the presidential election: residents who cast a ballot were offered $100 to sign a petition…

“Scatter cushions and bedspreads. Why? What for? If it wasn’t for the waste and environmental impact, I’d make a huge pile and torch them all. You’d see the fire from the Moon. Bedspreads first. Big, heavy, useless. They all need to be dragged off the bed and left in a heap on the floor. And then there’s the cushions. Mountains of them. Every night I hurl them off, cursing quietly. Every morning they are replaced. Off, on, off, on, for ever. Serving no purpose whatsoever in between the ons and the offs. I suspect they proliferate because they’re thought to make good gifts. The pile, the problem, the misery just grows, pillow upon pillow.” Adrian Chiles in The Guardian…

No, it’s not true that we’re all overtaxed Tom Calver The Sunday Times So you think the UK is a high-tax country? I hate to disabuse you, says Tom Calver, but most of us have actually done quite well out of the tax reforms of the past three decades. In 1990, income tax and national insurance contributions took up about 28% of the full-time worker’s average salary (then £12,000). Today, that salary (£39,000) is taxed at 19%. (And for workers on half the average salary the figure is only 10%, whereas it was 20% in 1990.) The average worker hands over far more in tax in other nations – 25% in Australia, 24% in the US, 40% in Belgium. British wages may look shoddy compared with German ones, but once…

Donald Trump has gone to war with America’s legal profession, said Ruth Marcus in The New Yorker. His goal is not only to avenge himself on perceived enemies, but to intimidate – and it seems to be working. Over the past few weeks, he has effectively threatened to put several major US law firms out of business, by signing executive orders terminating their federal contracts, instructing state agencies to end contracts with the firms’ clients, and banning their lawyers from government buildings. One of the firms, Perkins Coie, which worked closely with Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, has fought the order in court and won a restraining order. Two more followed last week. But another, Paul Weiss – whose lawyers had investigated Trump’s business dealings and sued alleged 6…

Bad news for bad backs There are all sorts of treatments available for lower-back pain; but the bad news for sufferers is that only about one in ten have been shown to be effective; and even these only offer modest relief. For a new study, researchers in Australia examined the results of 301 clinical trials, in 44 countries, that had looked into the effectiveness of 56 non-invasive treatments, including painkillers, light therapy, acupuncture and spinal manipulation. The use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), such as ibuprofen, was the only treatment judged to offer some relief, albeit modest, from acute lower-back pain. Paracetamol, exercise and steroid injections were shown by the available research to be ineffective. For those who had chronic pain, five treatments were found to be effective: exercise, spinal…

Cockney geezer actor Danny Dyer struck up a friendship with Harold Pinter when, aged 22, he auditioned for one of his plays. And he insists that his late mentor hated “the pause thing”, and would have been infuriated by some over-interpretations of his conversational ellipses. The worst example was Tom Hiddleston in Betrayal, Dyer told the Table Manners podcast. “He did a two-and-a-half minute pause. I thought, ‘Maybe he’s forgotten his lines?’ And then he just went ‘What?’ After two-and-a-half minutes!” Pinter, he added, would have thought it “a load of bollocks”. Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts was famously mild-mannered – unless you crossed him about jazz, says rocker Peter Wolf. Wolf once got into an argument with Watts about the greatest jazz drummers. “He said Philly Joe Jones, I…

Even before it was hit by last Friday’s magnitude 7.7 earthquake, Myanmar was deep in crisis, said Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post. A long civil war between the ruling military junta and an assortment of rebel groups had killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions; the economy was “in ruins”; about 20 million people – more than a third of the population – were already predicted to need some form of humanitarian aid this year. Now the quake, in which “multistorey buildings collapsed, temples and pagodas toppled over, and roads cratered”, has caused untold devastation. Its epicentre was near Mandalay, the country’s second-most populous city, but tremors were felt 600 miles away in Bangkok, where at least 20 people were killed. In Myanmar, the official death toll…

For many years, the FA Cup has felt like a competition dominated by a small group of clubs who don’t even value it that much, said Alyson Rudd in The Sunday Times. Thirty-one of the past 36 trophies have been won by just five teams: Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Manchester City, clubs that have habitually breezed through the early rounds “without really trying”, and have only tended to field full-strength teams upon reaching “the final itself”. Not only has this been “rather insulting” to smaller clubs, it created a competition that lacked “variety and yearning”. How different things have proved this year, though. “Like a reboot of a fading film franchise, the FA Cup suddenly feels fresh and exciting.” Last weekend delivered four quarter-finals “packed with desire”, and…

Tennis Novak Djokovic – bidding for his 100th career title – was beaten in the final in Miami by 19-year-old Czech player Jakub Menšik. Football Chelsea, the leaders of the Women’s Super League, dropped points for the third time this season as they drew 2-2 with West Ham. Rugby union Premiership leaders Bath beat Harlequins 47-28. Saracens moved to within two points of the top four with a win at Leicester. Darts The PDC World Championship announced it is doubling its prize money next year, with the winner receiving £1m.…

The End 2hrs 28min (12A) Tilda Swinton stars in a film about privileged lives at the end of the world Joshua Oppenheimer’s film is billed as a “post-apocalyptic musical” with a “bold vision”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. Now, I am all for “bold visions”, but maybe not if they have no plot and run for two and a half hours (I really feared The End might never end). Set two decades after a species-obliterating environmental catastrophe, it follows the lives of an ultra-privileged trio who have taken refuge in an “exquisitely decorated” subterranean bunker: a former oil tycoon (Michael Shannon), who spends his days drafting a self-exculpatory autobiography; his wife (Tilda Swinton), a former ballerina who claims to have performed with the Bolshoi; and their son (George MacKay),…

Suzanne Treister at Annely Juda Fine Art Suzanne Treister (b.1958) is a true original. In the 1980s, she was among the first British artists to create work using computer graphics, some of which you can see in Tate Modern’s current Electric Dreams exhibition. As the internet intruded ever further into daily life, however, she made the conscious decision to explore the roots and consequences of technological development through pointedly handmade work and archaic media, notably with a series of explosively colourful tarot cards (pictured). A full set of these is seen in enlarged form here, in Hexen 5.0 and Museum Paintings – each one a rambling psychedelic flow chart that identifies links between policy, business, climate change, spirituality and any number of other tangents. They are beautiful things that make…

Poland is associated with vodka, but the spirit is now “losing ground” to wine, says Jancis Robinson in the FT. The emergence of a Polish wine industry partly reflects the fact that summers there have “become warm enough to ripen grapes reliably”; but it’s also a symbol of the country’s growing prosperity and “Westernisation”. Currently, there are around 500 officially registered wineries, spread out across the west and south. Many of the grapes are unfamiliar hybrids, “sensibly bred” to resist disease and “to ripen early enough to escape the onset of the Polish winter”. I recently tasted “50-plus Polish wines” at an event in London, and was struck by how good many were. As is the case with English wine (the two countries’ vinicultures are somewhat similar), traditional-method sparkling wines…

● There are lots of good films and TV free to stream on BBC iPlayer (for licence payers), My5, U, Amazon Freevee, Freely, Plex, Tubi and Pluto TV. ITVX and Channel 4 have paid tiers with no ads and extra content, but the free ones have good stuff too. ● Many paid-for streamers offer a free trial, which might give you enough time to binge the best shows. Prime Video, Apple TV+, Paramount Plus and NOW are all offering trials at the moment. Some are also offered as parts of a bundle with a phone deal, bank account, insurance or store card. ● You’ll never have the time to watch all the shows on paid-for services, so rotate subscriptions. Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ all allow you to pause membership.…

Primrose Dunlop 1954-2025 Primrose Dunlop was an Australian socialite who briefly caught the attention of the world’s media when she was jilted by her fiancé, hours before her fairy-tale wedding in 1990, said The Times. Pitty Pat, as she was known, had been due to marry Lorenzo Montesini – who purported to be an Ottoman Prince – in a no-expense-spared ceremony in Venice. The guests had assembled, and a society priest, Father Vincent Kiss (later to be exposed as a paedophile), had been flown in from Australia to preside over the nuptials at the Basilica di San Pietro di Castello. The couple and their guests were then set to be borne in a regatta of gondolas to a candlelit reception in the marble hall of the Palazzetto Pisani, overlooking the…

World markets braced for President Trump’s reciprocal tariff onslaught with particular pain felt in Japan, where the Nikkei 500 lost more than 4% of its value in the run-up, and other Asian markets such as South Korea. Several countries rushed out measures to help local businesses. European markets also dipped: the FTSE 100 fell by about 1.4%, amid fading hopes of an opt-out for Britain. IMF boss Kristalina Georgieva said the impact on the global economy would not be “dramatic” – the US commands a lower share of the trade in goods than it once did – but warned of the danger of prolonged uncertainty. In Britain, the left-leaning Resolution think-tank warned that the Chancellor’s tax raid on businesses would lead to the loss of 85,000 jobs and drive up…

Tax: frenzied speculation With just £9.9bn of fiscal headroom, “the Chancellor has all but guaranteed… another six months of damaging speculation and uncertainty over tax policy”, said Paul Johnson of the IFS. The potential loss of reliefs on pensions and Isas sparked “panic” before the last Budget. Now there’s a race “to stuff money into tax-sheltered investments in case allowances are changed” – and renewed jitters about capital gains and inheritance tax hikes. Expect more “fiscal drag” as “the deep freeze on income tax thresholds” continues. Property: cautious recovery Last weekend was full of “high drama for house movers” racing to complete deals before stamp duty relief ended on 1 April. For first-time buyers, the zero-duty threshold fall from £425,000 to £300,000 will add around £11,000 to costs. Even so,…

The week’s best shares Arbuthnot Banking Group The Mail on Sunday The entrepreneurial bank, with a fast-growing wealth management arm, attracts well-heeled individuals and small business with old-fashioned service and tip-top tech. Could get a “Trump slump” boost. Buy. 895p. Genmab The Daily Telegraph This Danish biotech specialises in “bispecific” antibody treatments, and has an impressive R&D platform. Cancer drug Darzalex has clocked sales of £11.7bn, fuelling hopes of more blockbusters. Buy. 1,364 DKK. Morgan Advanced Materials The Daily Telegraph Morgan makes carbon and ceramic materials used in industries from healthcare to aerospace. Weak demand has hit shares, but profits are up. A solid balance sheet, low valuation and growth potential. Yields 5.8%. Buy. 211p. Supermarket Income Reit The Mail on Sunday This investment trust owns supermarket sites and leases…

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