2 h. ago ‘She killed three husbands with this teapot’: Prue Leith, John Swinney and more pick their favourite museum

From a stray meteorite to an immersive coal pit, via the chance to sit on a ‘feeding chair’, famous fans tell us how they fell in love with the UK’s Museum of the Year finalistsIt’s rare to hear someone getting this excited over a teapot. But as Terry Deary tells me, with exactly the kind of relish you’d expect from the author of Horrible Histories, this particular drinks vessel belonged to the Victorian-era mass murderer Mary Ann Cotton. Believed to have killed 12 of her children, not to mention three husbands, she was finally caught after poisoning her stepson in 1872 with an arsenic-laced brew. “And in Beamish they’ve got the teapot!” says Deary. “I was blown away to hold it!”He’s talking about Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, an open-air site based in County Durham (just like Cotton herself, who was eventually hanged in Durham Gaol). Featuring an 1820s tavern, a 1900s pit village and colliery, a 1940s farm and a 1950s town – all populated by costumed staff – it’s somethi...

Events

2 h. ago ‘She killed three husbands with this teapot’: Prue Leith, Huw Stephens and more pick their favourite museum

From a stray meteorite to an immersive coal pit, via the chance to sit on a ‘feeding chair’, famous fans tell us how they fell in love with the UK’s Museum of the Year finalistsIt’s rare to hear someone getting this excited over a teapot. But as Terry Deary tells me, with exactly the kind of relish you’d expect from the author of Horrible Histories, this particular drinks vessel belonged to the Victorian-era mass murderer Mary Ann Cotton. Believed to have killed 12 of her children, not to mention three husbands, she was finally caught after poisoning her stepson in 1872 with an arsenic-laced brew. “And in Beamish they’ve got the teapot!” says Deary. “I was blown away to hold it!”He’s talking about Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, an open-air site based in County Durham (just like Cotton herself, who was eventually hanged in Durham Gaol). Featuring an 1820s tavern, a 1900s pit village and colliery, a 1940s farm and a 1950s town – all populated by costumed staff – it’s somethi...

Events

2 h. ago Duux Whisper Flex 2: Is this the ultimate smart fan for heatwave relief?

This fan is a heatwave saviour

Politics

2 h. ago Best cloud storage platforms that make backing up your data a doddle

We’ve found the solutions that will give you peace of mind when it comes to precious data

Politics

2 h. ago Clueless review – Alicia Silverstone and Brittany Murphy are class acts in 90s Jane Austen parallel

Amy Heckerling’s high school romcoming-of-age classic, composed entirely of quotable funny lines, remains a sophisticated pleasure 30 years onThirty years ago, the world was swooning over Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice adaptation but all the time, the actual Jane Austen screen sensation that year was happening elsewhere in plain sight. Amy Heckerling’s high school romcoming-of-age masterpiece, inspired by Austen’s Emma, is now on re-release for its 30th anniversary and more than ever it feels like a complete joy, a deliciously movie-literate (and literate-literate) classic, with references to Stanley Kubrick, Oscar Wilde and William Burroughs to go with the Austen parallel.Clueless is something to compare with Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story – and Alicia Silverstone’s final, tearful scene matches, and even outclasses, Julia Roberts’ speech in Notting Hill about being just a girl standing in front of a boy. Like Withnail and I, it’s a film ...

Politics

2 h. ago Terminally ill husband and his wife make emotional road trip to honeymoon destination for 'final time'

Steven and Lorraine Cross are making the "once in a lifetime" trip to support the charity which has been there for them during Steven's cancer journey.

Politics

3 h. ago BBC Breakfast staff defend 'overwhelmingly loved' boss under fire from Naga Munchetty

It comes after it was revealed last week that editor Richard Frediani has reportedly taken an extended period of leave, after an internal review of bullying and misconduct allegations.

Events

3 h. ago This Bitter Earth at Soho Theatre review: Billy Porter makes an assured directing debut

This tale of an interracial couple in America is a fresh and illuminating take on recent social and political history that’s already being rewritten elsewhere

Politics

3 h. ago I’m a queer Palestinian. Stop using my identity as cover for the destruction of Gaza | Jad Salfiti

Rightwingers in Israel and the US claim they are defending LGBTQ+ rights while Gaza’s people are killed. Don’t dare do this in our namePride has never been apolitical, but in recent years, particularly after the Israeli occupation’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip after 7 October 2023, the coalition of queer rights in the west has felt increasingly fractured.In Berlin, the city I call home, Pride events have splintered along political lines as Palestine has been a recurring point of contention. According to organisers of Internationalist Queer Pride Berlin (IQP Berlin), a split between two major alternative Pride events followed an incident in which the initial organisers called police to the event after participants expressed solidarity by chanting “free Palestine”. Meanwhile, at Berlin’s official Pride parade, attenders have previously waved rainbow and Israeli flags as they marched through Berlin alongside an Israeli embassy float.Jad Salfiti is a British-Palestinian video producer a...

Politics

4 h. ago Like its demigod hero, Disney’s Hercules musical loses its divine status in clumsy hands

This show is lit up by sinuous harmonies and heart-melting ballads, but the warmth evaporates when the music stops

Politics

4 h. ago It Used to Be Witches by Ryan Gilbey review – an idiosyncratic guide to queer cinema

This engaging and experimental book explores the complex politics of LGBTQ+ representation in filmFor the British film critic Ryan Gilbey, “cinema and sexuality have always been as closely intertwined [ ] as the stripes on a barbershop pole”. His new book is a bricolage of memoir, criticism and interviews with film-makers that explores the personal and political dimensions of this coupling. It opens with the author in Venice, preparing to give a lecture on cinema; writing in the third person, Gilbey describes himself as the “Gustav von Aschenbach of easyJet”, a reference to the ageing, lustful composer from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (played by a moustachioed Dirk Bogarde in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film adaptation). Gilbey identifies with Aschenbach only because he remembers how his own once-hidden sexuality devitalised him: the closet “render[ed] him elderly before he had so much as touched puberty”. He employs the third person off and on throughout the book....

Politics

5 h. ago The Covid ‘lab leak’ theory isn’t just a rightwing conspiracy – pretending that’s the case is bad for science | Jane Qiu

While figures like Steve Bannon have exploited the issue, scientists have done themselves no favours by shutting down legitimate inquiryMore than five years after the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, its origins remain a subject of intense – and often acrimonious – debate among scientists and the wider public. There are two broad, competing theories. The natural-origins hypotheses suggest the pandemic began when a close relative of Sars-CoV-2 jumped from a wild animal to a human through the wildlife trade. In contrast, proponents of lab-leak theories argue that the virus emerged when Chinese scientists became infected through research-associated activities.A perplexing aspect of the controversy is that prominent scientists continue to publish studies in leading scientific journals that they say provide compelling evidence for the natural-origins hypotheses. Yet rather than resolving the issue, each new piece of evidence seems to widen the divide further.Jane Qiu is an award-winning i...

Politics

5 h. ago Celebs Go Dating star dies after 'long illness' as tributes paid to 'unique energy'

Eden Blackman was one of the original dating coaches on the E4 reality series

Events

6 h. ago The Original by Nell Stevens review – queering the Victorians

This flamboyant tale of fakers and forgery, straddling the turn of the 20th century, is a smart and witty investigation into love and authenticityWe become ourselves by copying others, whether dutifully or audaciously, in acts of homage or appropriation. What is education if not a prolonged process of copying, and isn’t the same true, Nell Stevens asks in her latest novel, of falling in love? Suddenly besotted with another young woman, her protagonist Grace begins to wear her scarf at the side of the neck as her lover does, and to feel “clearer and more deliberate and more like myself” as she does so. “When we fall in love with a person, we fall in love with the copy of them, inexpertly done, that we carry around with us whenever they aren’t there.”At its heart The Original has two strands of copying: both are preoccupations of the late-Victorian era the book is set in. There are the pictures made by Grace when she’s brought, penniless, to her uncle’s house aged 10 after her pa...

Politics

6 h. ago Chicken Town review – endearingly daft Fenland crime caper has a shedful of charm

Sparky performances lift this British crime comedy about a pair of young drug dealers who forge an unlikely alliance with a retired busybodyThere are echoes of Shane Meadows and the Coen brothers in this cheerful crime comedy set in the Fens in eastern England. It’s endearingly daft and unexpectedly charming for a film about small-town drug dealers full of knob jokes – and contains no actual violence from criminals who are more crap than nasty. There are some sparky performances from the young cast, and it manages to pull off natural, easygoing laughs without the cringe that often seeps into British comedies.Ethaniel Davy is brilliant as Jayce, who has just been released from 10 months in a young offenders’ institution – wrongly convicted for crashing a stolen car. Now that he’s out, he wants answers. What everyone except Jayce knows is that it was his best mate Lee (Ramy Ben Fredj, also terrific) behind the wheel of the car. Lee is the heir to a battery-chicken farming empire with ...

Events

7 h. ago ITV workplace sitcom Transaction breaks away from trans tropes with panache

Jordan Gray is excellent as the snarky, manipulative and completely unsackable new shop worker Olivia

Politics

7 h. ago Brad Pitt's F1 movie missed the point of what has made the sport so popular

F1: The Movie is visually and aurally spectacular pretty much from start to finish but, sadly, the Brad Pitt-led Hollywood take on the sport is let down by some glaring problems elsewhere

Culture

7 h. ago Death Stranding fans just realising where they've heard famous character's voice before

The release of Death Stranding 2: On The Beach on June 26th will see the return of several characters from the original game, and fans of the franchise have only just realised where they know one of the actors from

Events

8 h. ago Ironheart review – the small screen can barely contain the energy of this Black Panther spinoff

This rapid-fire new Marvel Cinematic Universe show for a younger audience is packed with cartoonish violence and flashy effects. Dominique Thorne’s reprisal of her Wakanda Forever role is stunningly charismaticAmid the usual welter of pre-emptive criticisms, hopes, dreams, doubts and hostilities that suffuse the internet whenever a new addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – or any other alternative world beloved of a fandom – is announced, Ironheart (the 14th TV series in the MCU and following on from the events in 2022’s film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) has at last arrived.In the film, Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne, reprising the role on the small screen, which can barely contain her charisma or energy) was the genius MIT student who invented the vibranium detector that rather kicked off the whole vibranium power struggle, then the metal exoskeletal suit that aided the Wakandans in their face-off with Talokan. At the end, she returned to MIT and that is where we find her...

Politics

8 h. ago Courts pushing back on corporate carbon offsetting claims, LSE report finds

Scrutiny of how companies plan to meet climate commitments is growing, with many successful legal challengesJudges across the world are proving sceptical of companies’ attempts to offset their greenhouse gas emissions by buying carbon credits, a report has found.In an analysis of nearly 3,000 climate-related lawsuits filed around the world since 2015, the latest annual review of climate litigation by the London School of Economics found action against corporations in particular was “evolving”, with growing scrutiny of how companies plan to meet their stated climate commitments. Continue reading...

Events