32 h. ago The best holidays to book for September 2025, from mountainous Montenegro to Sardinian beach breaks

Whether seeking a European walking holiday, Sardinian beach escape or a South African safari, plan ahead for a warm getaway after the schools reopen

Politics

3 d. ago Claims Freddie Mercury had secret daughter divides fans and friends

Woman claiming the late singer is her father speaks out after some of his inner circle cast doubt ahead of new bookHis performances defined an era, and his life story has been dissected in tell-all books as well as on the big screen.But now further revelations may open up an unknown chapter in the life of Freddie Mercury. Continue reading...

Events

3 d. ago Claim Freddie Mercury had secret daughter divides fans and friends

Woman claiming the late singer is her father speaks out after some of his inner circle cast doubt ahead of new bookHis performances defined an era, and his life story has been dissected in tell-all books as well as on the big screen.But now further revelations may open up an unknown chapter in the life of Freddie Mercury. Continue reading...

Events

7 d. ago I live in the Cotswolds – here are the best Christmas cottages you can book for 2025

I’ve lived in the Cotswolds for three years – and Christmas here is magical. These are the festive cottages I’d genuinely book now, from cosy couple escapes to wow-factor group stays.

Politics

7 d. ago London leaver: 'I was exhausted by London hustle culture — then I met a farmer from the Cotswolds'

Entrepreneur Samanah Duran was paying £1,600 a month on her West Kensington flat

Politics

8 d. ago Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to appear at 2025 Wigtown Book Festival

Comedians Julie Wilson Nimmo and Greg Hemphill and Del Amitri frontman Justin Currie will also be appearing at Scotland's Book Town.

Politics

1 week ago Pissants by Brandon Jack review – is this novel a critique or a celebration of toxic masculinity? Even it isn’t sure

The former AFL player’s debut novel barely has a plot, following a group of aggressive, entitled footy players as they get wasted and treat women like propsGet our weekend culture and lifestyle email“Virgil and Homer would recognise these hulking airborne men,” Helen Garner wrote of AFL players in her most recent book, The Season. As the celebrated author and footy tragic watched her grandson play in an under-16 league, she found in the sport “a kind of poetry, an ancient common language between strangers, a set of shared hopes and rules and images, of arcane rites played out at regular intervals before the citizenry”.Garner has enthusiastically blurbed the scabrous debut novel of former AFL player Brandon Jack: Pissants, a book mostly dedicated to the arcane rites that play out off the oval – preferably as far from the citizenry as possible. Whereas Garner lovingly traces the epic dimensions of teenage footy in the suburbs, Jack depicts AFL culture as a crucible for addiction, miso...

Events

3 w. ago The Idaho Four review – a disturbing, necessary portrait of a killer and his victims

James Patterson and Vicky Ward offer a definitive, and sadly true, account of Kohberger and the Idaho student murdersIn the early hours of 13 November 2022 in an off-campus apartment in Moscow, Idaho, a masked assailant murdered four students. The dead, who would come to be known as the Idaho Four, were Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen. Each was stabbed multiple times. The killer left a gruesome scene and the motive was not readily apparent.Videos, cellphone records and solid detective work led law enforcement to Bryan Kohberger, a doctoral candidate at Washington State University. Arrested at his parents’ home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, in late December, he was extradited back west. Continue reading...

Events

3 w. ago Cure by Katherine Brabon review – moments of grace in meditation on chronic illness

Doubles and reflections abound in this subtle exploration of the stories we tell about sickness, centring on a mother and daughter who travel to Italy in search of healingGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailKatherine Brabon’s fourth novel follows a mother and daughter with a shared experience of chronic illness who travel to Italy in search of a cure. It feels like a companion piece to her elegant previous novel Body Friend, about three women who seek out different ways of managing their chronic pain after surgery. Cure continues Brabon’s metaphoric use of doubles, mirrors and reflections to explore the social dimensions of the body in pain. It opens in Lake Como, where, we are told, in autumn “clouds devour the hills around the lake” and the water “reflects the scene of disappearance. [It] cannot help but replicate the obscuring fog.” Vera has been here before; she is now taking her 16-year-old daughter, Thea, to a small town in Lombardy, where she herself travelled with her...

Politics

4 w. ago ‘A relentless, destructive energy’: inside the trial of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon

An intimate account of an unprecedented trialIf we believe her parents, Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, a baby girl was born on Christmas Eve, 2022, in the upstairs bedroom of Woodcutters Cottage in Haltwhistle, Northumberland. Her mother knelt against the double bed and gave birth without assistance or complication. The baby spent the first days of her life in the small stone-terraced cottage and then began her travels, mostly carried by her mother in a sling, hidden under a burgundy puffer jacket. She travelled far for a newborn, passing through bus stations and port towns, hotels and cafes, cities and fields, from north to south, west to east. We know she lived for at least two weeks, but we don’t know, and can never know, precisely how she died. She was called Victoria. Continue reading...

Politics

4 w. ago ‘He didn’t think he was a good man’: new book reveals unseen portrait of JFK

In an exhaustively researched new book, J Randy Taraborrelli looks at the private, public and secret lives of the president J Randy Taraborrelli has already written five books on the Kennedy family but his sixth, JFK: Public, Private, Secret, is his first that’s directly about John F Kennedy, 35th US president from 1961 until his assassination in Dallas two years later.“I have been writing about the Kennedys from Jackie’s perspective for 25 years,” Taraborrelli said, referring to Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady who lived for another 30 years after he was shot, a figure of worldwide fascination. Continue reading...

Culture