98 minutes ago The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by William Saroyan review – vividly crafted Depression

The US author’s debut collection from 1934 focuses on impoverished individuals in precarious times using language that is punchy and full of compassionMany of the 26 stories in William Saroyan’s 1934 debut collection – reissued this month with an introduction by Stephen Fry – take place in Depression-era San Francisco and explore the experiences of ordinary people trying to get by. California-born, the son of Armenians who fled the genocidal Ottoman empire, Saroyan draws on his own heritage. His narrators are often struggling young writers, such as the protagonist of the title story, who lives on a diet of “bread and coffee and cigarettes” and laments the lack of “weeds in the park that could be cooked”.Despite the focus on poverty, there is an ebullience to Saroyan’s punchy prose. Take...

Politics

4 hours ago Brit mum, 54, dies after 'drinking psychedelic tea at spiritual jungle retreat'

Maureen Rainford from Romford collapsed after drinking Ayahuasca at an £800 retreat in Bolivia where she travelled to escape work and to 'detox from the noise of London'

Events

10 hours ago Doctor warns ‘dangerous’ TikTok weight loss hack should be ‘left in the 70s’

The Coffee Loophole diet has been taking TikTok by storm, but a doctor highlighted the major 'red flag'

Events

14 hours ago Gran, 54, collapses and dies on holiday after 'drinking tea laced with psychedelic drug'

Maureen Rainford died an hour after drinking Ayahuasca in a tea while in the Bolivian Amazon.

Events

16 hours ago Wales hit new low against South Africa as 12th straight loss piles on Warren Gatland pressure

Wales go a whole calendar year without notching a single Test victory for the first time since 1937

Events

16 hours ago Strictly's Pete Wicks and Jowita Przystal send fans wild with their chemistry during the Tango

The pair opened Saturday's show with a fierce Tango to Easy Lover by Philip Bailey and Phil Collins , and got a total score of 29 out of 40.

Sport

16 hours ago Strictly viewers criticise ‘terrible’ music for Pete Wicks performance

‘Who’s murdering one of my all time favourite songs?’ asked one viewer

Events

17 hours ago Corrie star returns to screen just months after leaving – and she'll be busy

Coronation Street's Alya Nazir is set to return to screens, and she's straightaway involved in an assault case and runs into her former lover, Adam Barlow, in a shock meeting

Politics

17 hours ago The Observer view: Selling a piece of fruit for £4m isn’t bananas, it’s decadent. Art is better than this

The sale of Maurizio Cattelan’s work, Comedian, to a crypto entrepreneur is a grim concept that has little to do with disruptionPaulina Brandberg, the Swedish minister for gender equality and work life, has a phobia of bananas so severe, her aides check rooms for the fruit before she’s due to enter them. Like other sufferers of this most unlikely of conditions, she is triggered by the merest traces of banana: a skin mouldering in a far-off wastepaper basket; a lingering smell; the sense that until recently something bendy and yellow lurked next to the perfectly innocent apples and oranges in the bowl on that coffee table.We can only hope, then, that the minister was – trigger warning – nowhere near the big auction house news of last week, in which a banana sold for $5.2m (£4.1m) at...

Economics