35 h. ago Labour set to free killers and rapists earlier under new soft

The Government's sentencing review was last night savaged by victims and senior police officers, while the Tories dubbed it a 'recipe for a crimewave'.

Events

44 h. ago 'Tate McRae is Gen Z incarnate of Britney Spears as seriously sexy shows sell out at O2'

REVIEW: Tate McRae spent the last two nights splitting, pole-dancing and grinding at an impressive sell-out debut at the O2. At just 21, the TikTok dancer turned singer is already a superstar

Politics

44 h. ago Nightingale by Laura Elvery review – Florence Nightingale inspires a luminous historical novel

Elvery’s prose is both sensual and brutal in this richly imagined account of war, memory and the life of history’s most famous nurseGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailThe year is 1850, the eve of the Crimean war, and Florence Nightingale is watching a group of boys at play. From a distance, she composes the scene, preparing to describe it in a letter to her aunt. “How did she want this part to sound?” she wonders – less concerned with what is happening than how it might be narrated. When she realises the boys are not kicking a ball but tormenting a baby owl, she doesn’t recoil. The horror of the image lands alongside another realisation: the story “might be better” now, though she is left considering how best to reframe the violence for her aunt: “Knowing she would narrate it later back in the house Florence would have to tell the story a different way”. That instinct – to reshape the unbearable into something legible – sits at the core of Nightingale, Laura Elvery’s rich an...

Culture

58 h. ago Poirot's on his hols, but all we get is a dreary lecture on the evils of empire: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV

Sir David Suchet on a surfboard is quite the mental image. In a striped 1920s bathing costume, the great thespian would be a picture of Hercule Poirot on his holidays.

Politics

3 d. ago Treating these children as guinea pigs and lab rats was unforgivable: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV

The grief of mother Angela Newcombe is almost unbearable to witness. It hits you in the stomach and twists up towards the heart, a physical anguish.

Politics

3 d. ago A Simple Accident review – Jafar Panahi takes us on a nightmare trip into a land of bribes and brutality

Cannes film festival An unfortunate encounter with a dog sets off a chain of surreal, grotesque events that expose the corruption and tyranny at the heart of IranJafar Panahi is the veteran Iranian auteur and democracy campaigner who continues to get arrested and imprisoned, to endure film-making bans and defy the law, finding loopholes through which his movies can be made and shown abroad. And the Iranian authorities, tensely and hypocritically aware of world scrutiny and indeed the soft-power prestige still to be accrued from Panahi’s eminence, appear (almost) to tolerate it.Now Panahi has come to Cannes with what might be his most emotionally explicit film yet: a film about state violence and revenge, about the pain of tyranny that co-exists with ostensible everyday normality. There are macabre stabs of satire, black comedy and horror-farce, and the movie almost looks like an Iranian dissident tribute to Weekend at Bernie’s or even Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry. Continue rea...

Politics

4 d. ago Kylie Minogue is shiny pop perfection in Manchester AO Arena return

It's utterly joyful shiny pop perfection - just like the woman herself. And if you've got a ticket, you're in for a treat, writes Dianne Bourne

Politics

4 d. ago Don't put our Rose in danger, she's a national treasure in the making: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV

Cruelty to puppies is one. Sneering at the late Queen is another. But most reprehensible of all, a crime beyond forgiveness, is being horrid to Rose Ayling-Ellis .

Politics

4 d. ago Supergrass Review: I Should Coco at 30 tour prove '90s legends are as fresh as ever

Supergrass' debut album anniversary show in Cardiff was sold out and it deserved to be

Politics

1 week ago Water in the Desert Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick review – hope at the end of the world

An evocative debut charts the journey of a group of travellers as they seek refuge in the wake of an unstoppable pandemicGethan Dick’s dystopia begins at Elephant and Castle in London. The narrator, a young woman who considers herself unexceptional, recalls a break in a water main at the big roundabout, a rupture that revealed “white quartz pebbles being washed clean, rattling as they went like in any stream bed”. The surfaces we have built on the face of the Earth to sustain us are just that, only surfaces, easily cracked open to show what’s roiling beneath.And this is how it is at the end of the world in Water in the Desert Fire in the Night. The setup for this slender, evocative debut will be eerily familiar to all its readers, albeit with the disaster quotient kicked up a notch. A pandemic arises and begins its cull, only this one is unstoppable: it results in whole streets full of the dead. Those who survive – and we don’t know why they do – must stick together, and so thi...

Events