It’s the closing weekend of Paris 2024 and we’re about to enjoy the biggest moment in British Paralympic basketball history. In fact I think it’s the biggest moment for British basketball, full stop. Britain play the USA in the men’s wheelchair basketball final on Saturday and we’ve never won gold, either men’s or women’s. What … Read more
Enter: the Carsley-verse. Look back just a couple of weeks and the Football Association’s decision to install an internal temporary replacement for the men’s senior manager, thereby delaying any permanent decision while relegitimising the architecture of the existing pathway structure, still felt like an act of such mind-numbing dullness that even reading these words now … Read more
One Saturday afternoon last February, a letting agent from Slough called Sundeep Jaswal sat down to watch Sheffield United play Aston Villa on TV. A lifelong Liverpool fan in his mid-50s, Jaswal had no interest in rooting for either team; but he did want one player, Villa’s Ollie Watkins, to perform as well as possible. … Read more
At the height of the Roman empire, after its conquest of Egypt in 30BC, luxurious Indian goods suddenly became available to Europeans in unprecedented quantities. No one could resist them. So much gold and silver flowed away to India to pay for these things, grumbled Pliny the Elder, that the subcontinent had become “the sink of the … Read more
I think more than any programme on television, Grand Designs gets the closest to demonstrating the core pathology of the British psyche. You know Grand Designs (11 September, 9pm, Channel 4), which turns 25 at the start of the new series and celebrates with a compilation show that surely constitutes the easiest working day of … Read more
By Anna Edgerton, Andrew Rosati, Gian Volpicelli and Daniel Carvalho Brazil’s ban of X amid a fight with Elon Musk over disinformation on his prized social-media site offers a cautionary message for other democracies trying to balance freedom of expression with the integrity of information ahead of elections. There’s no easy solution, including in … Read more
Going out: Cinema Starve AcreOut nowMatt Smith and Morfydd Clark play a couple beset by grief in this powerful adaptation of Andrew Michael Hurley’s dark folk-horror novel. Directed by Daniel Kokotajlo, it’s an unsettling trip into earthy, supernatural superstitions, set in rural 1970s Yorkshire. FirebrandOut nowDirected by Karim Aïnouz, this historical drama puts Henry VIII’s … Read more
It should have been an Instagram-perfect wedding image, but it turned out to be something more embarrassing. In the picturesque village of Geiranger, the jewel of Norway’s fjords and a Unesco world heritage site, Princess Märtha Louise was hurried to a tent, covered by sheets to thwart rival photographers. The photo rights of her marriage … Read more
Six years ago, on a work trip to London, James suddenly couldn’t read the text on his computer screen. It wasn’t just a glitch; looking around, he realized his whole visual field was filled with static. When he went to the hospital, he told a nurse that he had taken psychedelic mushrooms in Amsterdam with … Read more
The identities of “greedy” touts who hoovered up tickets for the Oasis reunion tour can be revealed, amid widespread condemnation of fans being exploited by ticket resale platforms. Analysis by the Guardian reveals that “secondary” ticketing platforms are advertising more than 4,500 tickets for all of the Gallagher brothers’ long-awaited UK shows – in breach … Read more