If you ever wanted to hear what it was like if Seal was just a bunch of seals, then here's that. Next we'd like to see what they can do with Korn.

This quick and funny Tumblr thread addresses the absurd and unnecessary nature of intellectual elitism. Just cause some writing isn't the most popular thing in school (or anywhere else) doesn't mean that it doesn't possess value. Some folks accept that, some folks don't. If you're looking for another Tumblr rabbit hole to fall down, check out the recent thread that looks at the discreet genius behind Nick Fury, in a famous scene from Captain America: The First Avenger.

If that didn't fill your cup, then check out these Tumblr gems of historical persuasion.

Achewood strip for Friday, November 11, 2016

Achewood strip for Friday, November 18, 2016

Achewood strip for Friday, December 9, 2016

Achewood strip for Sunday, December 25, 2016

It all started with an article about Wink Labs putting a monthly fee on their previously free service. It wasn’t so much the amount they were asking ($5 / month) that raised my hackles, but rather the fact that they would essentially render a device that you ostensibly bought worthless …read more

Touch-typing with thumbs on a mobile phone keyboard is a pretty familiar way to input text, and that is part of what led to BiTipText, a method of allowing bimanual text input using fingertips. The idea is to treat the first segments of the index fingers as halves of a …read more

As a general rule, you probably shouldn’t be getting your Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) from the party store. But these are exceptional times, and rather than potentially depriving medical professionals the equipment they so desperately need on the front lines, the team at [Robots Everywhere] has been looking into improvised …read more

After this pandemic thing is all said and done, historians will look back on this period from many different perspectives. The one we’re most interested in of course will concern the creativity that flourished in the petri dish of anxiety, stress, and boredom that have come as unwanted side dishes …read more

Over the past five years, Brighton-based photographer Richard Chivers has been shooting gas holders from London to Sunderland.for his project OFF-Grid, after learning that National Grid planned to demolish the structures. “They hold a certain nostalgia to our industrial heritage,” he says.

The myth of the American west meets the energy of riot grrrl in Justine Kurland’s photographs of free-spirited teenage girls

In 1997, Justine Kurland, then a fine arts student at Yale University, went in search of teenage girls to photograph. At a time of increasing conformity and commercialised ideas of beauty, the girls she had in mind were free-spirited and wild-haired; making dens and hanging out in woods, messing about in rivers, smoking in parking lots, lost in languid afternoons, careless not only of the male gaze but any onlookers at all.

Kurland started out on her quest in New Haven’s semi-industrial hinterland before travelling further afield over the next five years on a mazy road trip; if the girls were on the margins, then she would be too. She loosely choreographed the groups of teenagers that she found, but mostly invited the girls into a promising setting and let them do their thing. She took this photograph of four girls in an abandoned car in the millennium year, and called it Shipwrecked. The girls she chose invariably understood the idea of the pictures. “I can always spot people,” she has said. “It’s, like, really one of my superpowers. I can always tell which teenage girls would love living in the woods with their friends.”

When Rhys Graham first picked up his camera in lockdown, he assumed he would take a few portraits of friends. Now, weeks in, it has turned into a sprawling project documenting Australia’s new domesticity

In these strange, suspended times, a camera and lens can be an emotional bridge from one person to the next.

As a film-maker you become reliant on the manic energy of shooting and the warmth of your community – crews, actors, colleagues or subjects – to keep you buoyant.

After facing the existential threat of testing positive for Covid-19, these Australians describe the reactions of their communities

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When they emerged from isolation, one felt like an escapee, another saw friends turn on their heels and some questioned if they had really recovered. Though their symptoms varied, all the accounts from these people who have recovered from coronavirus echo the same sentiment: recovery came at a price. Weeks after getting better, strangers and loved ones still scrabble to create distance, afraid of contagion.

At the time of writing, 5,984 Australians had recovered from the 6,875 confirmed cases. While the emerging consensus is that recovery induces, at least, short-term immunity, the World Health Organization urges caution, and researchers and health authorities are racing to determine how long this defence lasts.

Jaston Khosa was one of 600,000 men from African countries who fought for Britain. He was quietly buried on VE Day after a life of abject poverty

In a crowded, Zambian slum on VE Day, a family gathered to bury one of the last veterans of Britain’s colonial army. Jaston Khosa of the Northern Rhodesia Regiment was laid to rest on the day the world commemorated the end of the war in which he fought.

The 95-year-old great-grandfather was among 600,000 Africans who fought for the British during World War Two, on battlefields across their own continent as well as Asia and the Middle East. Although their service has largely been forgotten, the mobilisation of this huge army from Britain’s colonies triggered the largest single movement of African men overseas since the slave trade.

Victor Grayson was briefly the most famous socialist in Edwardian England. But in 1920 he disappeared. His fate remains one of the most compelling mysteries in British political history

“Oh mad, foolish Grayson!”
Editorial in the socialist magazine The Clarion, August 1907

In the aftermath of the general election of February 1974, the mood in Marsden socialist club in west Yorkshire was grim. David Clark, the young Labour MP for Colne Valley, in which the former mill town of Marsden sits, had lost his seat. Clark gamely attempted to lift his activists’ spirits with a rousing speech. But one elderly stalwart remained unmoved: “Old Harry was sitting at the bar nursing a pint,” recalls Clark, who is now 80 and a Labour peer. “He said: ‘All due respect to master Dave, but we’ve only ever had one true socialist MP around here. And that was Victor Grayson.’”

Try a dark matt lipstick, but don’t be scary

Unless you are into goth, you wouldn’t look to The Addams Family for beauty inspiration. However, there’s a modern way to go there without alarming anyone on Zoom, and the fresh take at the Max Mara SS20 show makes the case. If you find the requisite black lips intimidating, replace with a less macabre deep burgundy or aubergine. Swap matt alabaster skin for something a little less lifeless – a decent tinted moisturiser will warm things up. Finish with a pastel wash of colour across the eyes. Immediately, everything looks less intense. Morticia would be mortified.

1. Jimmy Choo Seduction Lipstick in Purple Night £50, harrods.com
2. Huda Beauty Pastel Obsessions £27, selfridges.com
3. Laura Mercier Caviar Mascara £22, spacenk.com
4. Smashbox Always On Liquid Lips in Disorderly £19, smashbox.co.uk
5. Glossier Skywash Eyeshadow £15, glossier.com

Sales from online dealers has shot up during the lockdown. Here’s your chance to find some great deals and also to try some new bottles and grapes

Shaw and Smith Sauvignon Blanc, Adelaide Hills, Australia 2019 (£14.95, slurp.co.uk) With most of us living out most of our lives in the virtual world at the moment, it’s not surprising that a lot of wine buying has migrated online, too. Depending on which statistical data gatherer you believe, sales of alcohol online were up by as much as 50% in the first weeks of the crisis v “normal” times. A lot of those sales went through the virtual tills of the supermarkets, of course. But the online wine specialists have been benefiting, too. If you’re looking to dip a toe into online wine buying for the first time, many retailers are offering discounted mixed cases to get you started. Slurp.co.uk, for example, has a 10-bottle “Indulge in Isolation” case, which at £120 works out as a £50 discount. There are some nice wines in there, although, personally, I’d rather go à la carte on slurp’s extensive list, filling a case with bottles such as Shaw and Smith’s superbly zingy, pristine sauvignon.

De Martino Viejas Tinajas Cinsault, Itata, Chile 2018 (£14.95, virginwines.co.uk) One mixed case that I do like the look of is Virgin Wine’s selection of contemporary German bottles, which, includes pinot blanc and pinot noir as well as a scintillating example of the country’s most famous grape variety, Gunderloch Fritz’s Riesling, Rheinhessen 2017 (a bottle of which is £14.99 on its own; The Best of Modern Germany case of 12 bottles is £140). You could also include any of those Germans in a mixed case with a wine such as the gorgeously light, rosehippy-red fruited, clay amphora-made Viejas Tinajas from Chile. Meanwhile, the UK’s oldest wine retailer, and one of the first to make a success of online, Berry Bros & Rudd, has a tempting 12 for £200 mix and match offer of 30 smart bottles, which is pretty good value for wines from the likes of De Martino, the Loire’s Vincent Carême, Beaujolais’ Julien Sunier and the Douro’s Quinta de la Rosa.

A loving touch will get seedlings ready to plant

As spring turns to summer, gardeners everywhere will be itching to plant the seedlings and cuttings they’ve been raising indoors out in the garden. However, particularly for newbies, the effects of this transition from the cosseted conditions of a warm windowsill to the great outdoors can be a significant hurdle.

The reason why this switch is tricky is that plants have the amazing ability to adapt their anatomy to shield themselves from environmental threats, however they are only triggered to do so when stimulated by the threat itself. Indoors, plants enjoy stable temperatures, limited air movement and much lower light levels (as window glass filters out UVB rays). This means they tend to direct most of their energies into growing, instead of investing in these defences.

And they’re off! The baby peas and beans are out on their own. But will they survive?

Sleep restless, anxiety dreams, and if there wasn’t enough to be concerned about I am worrying about our baby beans and peas.

It is often like this in spring. The responsibility, it comes with the shorter nights and longer light, maybe I have more time on my hands. I have saved two hours a day on travelling and I only work a few miles’ walk from home. This extra time has now become a trip to the plot, or perhaps pottering on the terrace. A more intimate gardening relationship cemented in the spring mornings. Deepened, more dependent.

Author Dan Richards, who has travelled to the ‘ends of the earth’, says he is now applying similar coping skills to being alone and indoors for weeks

You join me overlooking an empty Edinburgh crossroads, an indoorsman considering my new neck of the woods. Near-empty buses roll down Dundas Street and shush across the junction in the haar (fog). In this brave moot world – a month of Christmas mornings so far – I watch lone joggers and mothers with children, and wave at good dogs. I write to my friends. I check in by phone. “Yes,” I say, several times a week, “Edinburgh’s very nice. Quiet.”

Two years ago, I spent several months travelling for a book, seeking out solitude and remote locations – strange to think now. I visited wild places on the edge – frozen Soviet ghost towns, Mars missions in the Utah desert, shrines perched high on Japanese mountains – as well as spartan structures whose wildness emanated from within, such as Simon Starling’s metamorphic installation Shedboatshed, the writing “Wendy houses” of Roald Dahl and Tove Jansson, and Roger Deakin’s Suffolk shepherd’s hut.

We may be spending less by not travelling to work, but with an uncertain future it’s time to take stock of personal finances

With gyms shut, taps turned off in pubs and the prospect of a holiday a distant dream, many people are finding their outgoings have dropped since lockdown. But the shadow of a looming recession and concern about whether jobs will even exist when offices reopen, means many are looking at their finances even more closely.

So what are the best ways to improve them amid extraordinary times and an uncertain future?

Dave Burd brings a lightly fictionalised tale of his comedy rap career in a new sitcom. Plus: The Fantastical Factory of Curious Craft. Here’s what to watch this evening

He gave McCartney tips on how to scream in tune and paved the way for everyone from Otis Redding to Prince. Richard Penniman showed the world how rock’n’roll could be a manifesto for personal liberation

Little Richard’s Rip It Up entered the UK top 30, right at the bottom, in December 1956. It looked up at a chart that included Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, but was mostly filled with light opera gloop such as Malcolm Vaughan’s St Therese of the Roses, three different versions of the cod-calypso of Cindy, Oh Cindy, and toddler-friendly novelties including Dickie Valentine’s Christmas Island and Mitchell Torok’s When Mexico Gave Up the Rhumba, while the spirit of the blitz lived on with Vera Lynn’s A House With Love in It. Play any of these records either side of Rip It Up and the effects are guaranteed goosebumps, an involuntary laugh and real surprise. With the sheer volume of Richard’s raw-throated scream – ebullient, gleeful, quite filthy – the shock of the new can still be felt. Rip It Up – that title alone!

Think of Bowie. Think of Prince. Little Richard was doing the same thing – with greater extravagance – decades earlier

The Observer’s critics recommend the best new arts shows to enjoy on TV, on the radio and online

Barber Shop Chronicles
A never-before-broadcast recording of Inua Ellams’s 2017 hit play splicing stories and banter with barbs and laughter. Available to stream for seven days from 7pm Thursday on the National Theatre’s YouTube channel. Clare Brennan

Author David McKee reveals why, 40 years on, his cautionary tale of the perils of ignoring children is still relevant

For the past 40 years it has been a warning to parents about the monstrous consequences of ignoring their children. Now new illustrations of the classic picture book Not Now, Bernard have been created to better reflect the daily life of families in the age of smartphones and tablets.

Eliza Hittman’s coming-of-age story about a US teenager seeking a termination is heartbreaking and painfully authentic

From Eliza Hittman, the remarkable writer-director of It Felt Like Love and Beach Rats, comes another drama that manages to blend the gritty authenticity of a documentary with the poetic sensibility of pure cinema. In her impressively measured and beautifully understated third feature, Hittman tells an oft-hidden story of reproductive rights – an age-old issue that has urgent contemporary relevance. Yet Never Rarely Sometimes Always never feels polemical. On the contrary, it is perhaps best described as a perfectly observed portrait of female friendship; a coming-of-age story with road-movie inflections, piercingly honest and deeply affecting.

Feature first-timer (and accomplished musician) Sidney Flanigan is superb as Autumn, a 17-year-old from Pennsylvania who discovers that she cannot get an abortion in her home town without parental consent. Quietly desperate, Autumn reluctantly confides in her more outgoing cousin Skylar (rising star Talia Ryder, soon to be seen in Spielberg’s West Side Story), who agrees to accompany her across state lines to New York. The pair imagine that the trip will be brief but find themselves spending days and nights on the streets, waiting for the procedure that Autumn was denied in Pennsylvania.

The former EastEnders actor talks about shooting a pilot on a deadly virus, telling British stories with a difference – and how playing a bit part as a pigeon changed his career

The so-called “curse of EastEnders” – the struggle for soap actors to transition into more prestigious dramatic roles after leaving the show – always weighed heavily on the mind of Himesh Patel.

So when he decided to leave the soap in 2016, after nine years playing Tamwar Masood, he knew whichever role he chose next would be critical in breaking typecast, perhaps even defining the rest of his career. He went to a friend whose theatre company, withWings, took inventive musical adaptations to the Edinburgh fringe. That year they were doing Le Bossu, a retelling of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Patel mentioned that he wanted to get out of his comfort zone and do some theatre. “He came back to me and said, ‘Cool, well, I can offer you the role of a pigeon.’”

Prosecutor rejects Australia’s argument International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction because Palestine is ‘not a state’

The Australian government has told the International Criminal Court it should not investigate alleged war crimes in Palestine because Palestine is “not a state”, arguing the court prosecutor’s investigation into alleged attacks on civilians, torture, attacks on hospitals, and the use of human shields, should be halted on jurisdictional grounds.

Australia was lobbied to make the submission to the court by Israel, which is not a party to the court. But the office of the prosecutor has rejected Australia’s argument, saying it had not formally challenged Palestine’s right to be a party to the court before.

Rise of spy chief to premier comes as Iran struggles to maintain momentum months after killing of powerful general

In late February, six weeks after the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani was killed by a US drone, a candidate for Iraq’s vacant premiership was nervously preparing for an interview that would secure him the role.

Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s rise from intelligence chief to the seat of national power had been unorthodox, as was the journey he had just made – from Baghdad, where high-stakes appointments like his had mostly been made over the past decade.

Transport secretary announces £2bn package to get UK walking and cycling instead

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The enormity of the challenge of getting the UK back to work was laid bare on Saturday, as the government acknowledged that the capacity of Britain’s transport network will be reduced by 90%.

The transport minister, Grant Shapps, said at the daily Downing Street press briefing that even if a full public transport service is restored, the government’s two-metre physical distancing rule will mean 10% of the usual number of passengers will be able to travel.

At the go-getting estate agency’s AGM this week, all minds will be focused on getting out of a tricky situation

When a Foxtons employee looks in the mirror, the estate agent can discern a reflection that others cannot.

To them, the figure smiling back is a dashingly attired young tycoon – confident that their sharp wits are about to land them another tasty commission. But many of those attempting to buy a home in London might interpret that same image as – how shall we put this? – slightly less heroic.

Modest changes expected to include relaxing exercise rules and reopening garden centres

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Boris Johnson’s plans to ease the UK lockdown are likely to be in line with Wales, which would result in only modest changes such as the reopening of garden centres and libraries, and a relaxation of exercise rules, the Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, said on Saturday.

Drakeford said the prime minister’s announcement for England would be in line with the very smallest easing granted in Wales.

The museums of Europe have begun reopening their doors to art lovers desperate to see old favourites and new works

I am cursing my bad luck not to be stuck in lockdown in the Prado. A friend wishes she had stowed away in a closet before they bolted the doors of the National Gallery. Others would give anything for a week in the Rijksmuseum, a day in the Uffizi, an hour with Rembrandt or Vermeer, even just a few minutes with a Samuel Palmer moonscape in the Ashmolean or a Turner sunrise at Tate Britain. Museums are places of the heart.

We see art in time and place; we cannot see it otherwise. Of course there are other whereabouts of the works we most long to set eyes on again, during this evil pandemic: the cave paintings at Chaumet in France, Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in a Florentine monastery, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty coiled in the glistening waters of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. These were all chosen in an unofficial and entirely self-selecting Twitter survey (mine), along with Leonardo’s The Last Supper and James Turrell’s Deer Shelter Skyspace, framing the blue heavens above Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

The highest rates of Covid-19 casualties are in countries run by know-nothing populists

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All of a sudden, and after years of bluffing, conservatives are warning of the dangers of jumping to hasty conclusions. Before I go any further, I must therefore say our newly scrupulous masters have a point. The league tables of national Covid-19 death figures are not the last word on the crisis, and may look different in a few weeks. That’s that done, then. Everybody happy? Good. Let’s get on with it.

In the world as it is, rather than as it may be, a shameful fact is undeniable. The highest Covid-19 casualties are in the US and the UK, where the mendacities of the populist right have deformed society. It turns out that being governed by Anglo-Saxon conservatives is a threat to the health of nations. Their rule kills the old and blights the futures of the young. To understand their ineptitude, think of how conservatism turned into a know-nothing culture in the past decade, and ask what Donald Trump and Boris Johnson would be doing in an alternative universe where they never came close to power.

Thatcher’s simplistic aversion to borrowing still haunts fiscal policy, but interest rates have been falling for many years

It is clear Boris Johnson has favoured his health advisers as he looks to ease the lockdown. Worries about a second coronavirus outbreak have clinched victory over concerns about keeping much of industry and commerce in a state of suspended animation.

After weeks of pleading by the Treasury to get the nation back to work, No 10 has opted to play it safe with people’s health, and particularly older people. And no wonder, after a hapless first few months in which the UK leapt to fourth place in probably the most ignominious league table in modern history – that of Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 population – behind Belgium, Spain and Italy.

The rights of the most vulnerable, including those with dementia, should not be violated

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Last week, driving to the shops, I passed a care home and saw a figure standing at an upstairs window: an old woman looking out at a world she could not enter. She looked like a prisoner. And in a way, that’s probably what she was.

Let’s talk about old people. Let’s talk about people in care homes, about people living with dementia and dying with dementia, out of sight and out of mind, and what the lockdown means for them. Let’s talk about what we are not talking about enough, not thinking about enough, not caring about enough.

Research finds that both male and female judges are more likely to employ female clerks if they have worked with women

Discrimination over jobs is bad. Bad for those discriminated against, and bad for society, as talent is wasted and divisions sown.

Women reaching senior leadership positions in organisations is generally a sign of success for gender equality – but it can also lead to increased equality elsewhere. That is the important finding from new research on the (not famously diverse) world of judges. The study looks at the hiring of law clerks by senior judges in the US.

Marta was right when saying Formiga will retire eventually but PSG’s record-breaking midfielder is preparing for a seventh Olympic Games next summer

When England stepped out at Meadow Lane in October 2018, having qualified unbeaten for the Women’s World Cup, all eyes were on one opponent: Brazil’s six-times Ballon d’Or winner, Marta. Necks prepared to strain for a glimpse of the ageing giant of women’s football. It may have been a friendly but at 34 the Brazilian’s career clock was ticking. For most, it would be the only time to see her in the flesh.

When Marta limped off after 22 minutes the disappointment of the crowd was palpable. The Brazil performance matched Marta’s lacklustre mood but in the then 40-year-old Formiga they had a player who would not subscribe to her teammates’ indifference – with the young winger Ludmila the exception alongside her.

• Sarries players urged to focus on international future
• ‘I’m quite confident that they will make good decisions’

Maro Itoje and Mako Vunipola have been urged to make “good decisions” for their international careers by the England defence coach, John Mitchell, with both players yet to commit to Saracens next season.

Itoje had hoped to receive dispensation to continue his England career while spending next season on loan in France at Racing 92 rather than in the Championship with relegated Saracens. However, that move was blocked by the other Premiership clubs since it did not meet “exceptional circumstances”, the loophole that allows England’s head coach, Eddie Jones, to select overseas-based players in the event of an injury crisis.

Two players and a photographer remember what it was like to face Castilla at an empty Upton Park in 1980

At half-time West Ham’s former chairman Len Cearns was sent on a futile mission by his fellow directors. They wanted him to go down to the home dressing room to ask John Lyall if there was any way his team could possibly remember that the foul language being used in the heat of battle was floating away from the pitch, rattling around the empty terraces and causing some discomfort for the people sitting in the posh seats.

“There was a lot of swearing going on in the game,” Alvin Martin says as he recalls West Ham hosting a European tie behind closed doors in the autumn of 1980. “You don’t realise it. You’re communicating in a factory way.”

Elite clubs will prey on desperate ones in the hunt for bargains as the game reels from its biggest financial hit since the 1930s

Even at the time – in 2017 – the fee Paris Saint-Germain paid Barcelona for Neymar was extraordinary: £198m was 125% more than the previous record, set a year earlier when Manchester United had signed Paul Pogba from Juventus. Transfer records simply aren’t broken by that amount in the usual run of things. It was a statement signing, a deal designed not only to land the player, but to emphasise PSG’s financial power, to highlight their status as a super-club while inflating the market to a level at which only the mega-rich could compete.

Three years on, with football suspended across the globe and major leagues desperately seeking ways to get games on to stave off financial apocalypse, the world looks very different. A model predicated on constant growth has received an abrupt shock.

Volunteers who help the British Grand Prix run smoothly want to get back trackside but questions remain on safety and testing

“We are like one big family,” says Carolyn Doyle of the bond between the marshals of the British Grand Prix. “We are there because we love it and we want to achieve the same thing – that’s what makes it really special.”

Much as it does bring great pleasure to this selfless collective, the sport knows their presence is invaluable. As Silverstone considers hosting two consecutive races behind closed doors in July, the volunteer marshals are having to consider the new realities imposed on Formula One by the coronavirus crisis.

Marcus Arbery Sr says Ahmaud’s death at the hands of two white men, while he was out for a run, was an act of racism

Marcus Arbery Sr says his son was just like him, fit and athletic.

Related: ‘Every stone will be uncovered’: how Georgia officials failed the Ahmaud Arbery case

The White House press secretary has made a confident start in a notoriously difficult role. Those who know her say the media and opponents underestimate her at their peril

It was a mic drop designed to thrill conservatives and infuriate liberals and the media.

Related: 'You can't ask the virus for a truce': reopening America is Trump's biggest gamble

The singer and songwriter on dealing with solitude, her favourite cafe and why she’s hooked on Frasier

How does Sunday start? With disappointment – Frasier isn’t on TV at the weekend. The show is perfection. I watch it every morning. Whatever time I go to bed I sleep for eight hours. Once I’m up I call a friend and put them on loudspeaker while I have breakfast in the garden and take a bath.

Recovering from a big night? Not since I stopped partying 10 years ago. Back then I’d still be going on Sunday morning, inviting people round. Drugs make you into a dickhead. The happier I’ve become, the less I’ve wanted to be destructive, transported somewhere else. But it took a few years to no longer feel I was missing out.

Acclaimed photographers from around the world share a single image reflecting on their experience of the coronavirus outbreak

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Neighbours of Tamsin Calidas, who moved to Scotland from London, are keen to put their side as her book I am an Island looks set for success

Tamsin Calidas’s memoir about swapping Notting Hill for a croft on a small Hebridean island luxuriates in its landscape. The heather and the Munros, the raw skies and the wild tides of the Atlantic are lavishly described. The islanders, by contrast, are largely anonymous, thoughtless and cruel.

The first rule is, don’t be a complete schmuck...

In the opening chapter of Wine Girl, the hugely entertaining memoir by Victoria James, once America’s youngest sommelier, the author describes a blood-boiling encounter with the kind of customer for whom involuntary euthanasia should be devised. It is a Monday lunch at the glossy Aureole in New York and the host of a testicle-heavy table of four has ordered a $650 bottle of a serious white burgundy (a 2009 Chevalier-Montrachet from Domaine Ramonet).

Having checked at her serving station that the wine isn’t tainted, James returns to the table and pours a small measure for the customer to taste. He declares it corked. “I think she has too much perfume in her nose, this girl…” he says, as if competing for a gold in the misogyny Olympics. There are only two bottles of the wine in the restaurant’s cellar. James does not want to waste a big-bucks bottle when she knows it is perfectly fine. Instead, she presents the unopened second bottle, takes it away, then returns and gets him to taste the original bottle again. And between racist epithets, he declares it perfect, with a fat top note of triumph in his voice. Witness: small penis energy.

The Labour MP and A&E doctor on her run-in with the health secretary and her shifts on the hospital frontline

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When Rosena Allin-Khan stood up in the House of Commons last Tuesday to address the health secretary, Matt Hancock, she anticipated being stonewalled. She didn’t expect to become the story.

In her other life, the MP for Tooting is an A&E doctor and intensive care specialist and has been working 12-hour hospital shifts throughout the pandemic. Allin-Khan reported that the government’s failures were contributing to a greater loss of life and she wanted answers on its testing strategy. The health secretary awkwardly responded by suggesting that Allin-Khan’s testimony was untrue and moreover, that she “might do well to take a leaf out of the shadow secretary of state’s book in terms of tone”.