At the scene of one of his Europa League final triumphs, the manager is setting targets to achieve success with Villa

For Unai Emery, there was a welcome air of familiarity upon arrival at Basel’s St Jakob-Park on Wednesday. It was a return to Switzerland and the scene of his third Europa League triumph with Sevilla in 2016, when his side overcame Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool, 3-1.

“This competition is so, so special for me,” the Aston Villa manager said. “We won here, it was a fantastic day and is a fantastic memory. To remember it is very good.” And then came a big but. Two, in fact. “I want to build a new moment, a new era, a new way with Aston Villa. I can remind myself of the moment I had here.”

In her complex works, the Polish artist manipulates images of male nudes to comment on masculine power-plays and female emancipation

To give people a sense of her evolution, the lauded Polish artist Zofia Kulik likes to compare two of her creative milestones. The first was the centrepiece of her earliest exhibition as a solo artist in 1989 , where she debuted her groundbreaking, technically complex photomontages in which dizzying patterns are woven from repeating imagery. It’s a self-portrait where she peers uncertainly from a mandala made from tiny posturing male nudes, “pressed in by men” as Kulik puts it.

The second was made nearly a decade later in 1997, the year that that artistic leap into the unknown was given the ultimate public affirmation and she represented her country at the Venice Biennale. This time she’s an assertive queen, posed like Elizabeth I, resplendent with a ruff, wide-skirted and sleeved gown, embellished with decorative patterns of those naked men.

The name originated during the period of Boris Johnson boosterism. People no longer want Brexit triumphalism, but things that actually work

What’s in a name? A government minister has a good answer for Shakespeare’s question. “Names aren’t just convenient labels for people, places and things. They come with expectations,” the minister said. “Countries don’t normally have these pressures. But Great Britain? It’s quite a name to live up to.”

The words are from the opening of Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back, published last year by the Labour MP Torsten Bell, now a Treasury minister. Bell’s book is about why this country is, and feels, broken. But it is also spot on about this country’s enduring naming problem. As Bell puts it: “What began as a statement about our geography has become one about our quality.”

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Norwich Theatre Royal
There are eye-popping designs, playful puns and musical flourishes as Joe Tracini’s story unfolds on its own madcap shoreline

Here is a sun-kissed panto to dispel any dreams of a white Christmas. Joe Tracini’s script is set in the seaside town of Crabbington Sands where a pastel-dressed ensemble make merry with Aimee Leigh’s breezy choreography. Cinderella’s sisters, gruesome twosome Lou and Lav (cue toilet-flush effect), could have stepped out of an outrageously saucy postcard. Designer Kirsteen Wythe gifts them lurid costumes best seen with UV protection. They include a beach ball-shaped dress, a bucket-and-spade hat, fairground-ride frocks and wigs seemingly woven with fishing rope.

Cinderella’s parents ran a local hotel that has been shuttered since she lost them, and she yearns for new adventures, a longing captured in an opening rendition of Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten. In the lead role, Georgia May Foote brings a big sister vibe to her crowdwork with the young audience that also underlines how Cinders sees the hopelessly devoted Buttons (Tracini) as a brother. But she is written to be a bit insipid, and there is little spark to her romance with a wannabe rock-star prince (Danny Hatchard, poised between buffoon and decent bloke).

Marielle says being recorded is part of being her friend, but Beth is fed up of being a muse. Who should reel it in?

• Get a disagreement settled or become a YBTJ juror

Sometimes she films me while I’m eating. I’ll see myself on her Instagram – it’s like a jumpscare

I want Beth to see t hat the content we make together can get us a foot in the door

Dutch rising star has gone from not knowing ‘how to grip the dart’ to a dark horse for the PDC world championship

It’s the deciding leg of the European Championship final. Gian van Veen, the 23-year-old from the Netherlands chasing his first major title, has just missed two match darts to win 11-9. Luke Humphries, world No 1 at the time, starts the final leg with a 140.

“Oh, you’ve blown it here,” Van Veen replies when asked to describe his internal monologue during that moment in October. “Luke Humphries is not going to crumble under this pressure. Maybe it was a negative thought. But it also released some pressure for me, in a way.”

No parent should worry about their child’s safety while they work. But a crisis in our early-years sector is shielding predators such as Vincent Chan

I remember those initial heart-wrenching days and weeks leaving my daughter, aged nine months, at the nursery. She was distraught as I left, and I – like so many parents – headed off to work feeling guilty for leaving her, wondering if I was doing the right thing. Every parent does the research and nursery visits, reads the Ofsted reports and assumes that the staff in their chosen nursery will have the necessary qualifications and training to take care of their child. Obviously, there will be hiccups along the way, but never in your wildest nightmares do you think your child might be physically – or worse still, sexually – abused.

Yet the harrowing case of Vincent Chan , a former nursery worker in Camden, north London, who pleaded guilty to nine counts of sexual assault and 17 counts of taking or making indecent photos of children, hit the headlines last week, leaving parents with young children across the country feeling physically sick and asking the question: How did this happen? Tragically, this is not an isolated case.

Munira Wilson is Liberal Democrat MP for Twickenham

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Most metros use plastic or metal, but the distinctive fabrics on London’s network are full of clues to its history

When I first came to London from Yorkshire in the late 1980s, I found the tube replete with bizarre novelties. Among them was the way most trains required me to sit sideways to the direction of travel, as on a fairground waltzer. Directly opposite me was another person or an empty seat, and while I knew not to stare at people, I did stare at the seats – at their woollen coverings, called moquette. I have since written two books about them, the first nonfiction, Seats of London , and now a crime novel, The Moquette Mystery.

I was attracted to moquette firstly because it, like me, came from Yorkshire (most of it back then was woven in Halifax), and whereas many foreign metros have seats of plastic or steel, moquette made the tube cosy. Yet it seemed underappreciated. The index of the standard history of the tube, for instance, proceeds blithely from Moorgate to Morden.

This Trinidadian family saga blurs the line between real and imagined to create a multilayered history of an island and its people

Ever Since We Small opens in Bihar, India in 1899. Jayanti dreams of a woman offering her bracelets. Within days, her husband becomes sick and dies. Widowhood is not an option and Jayanti prepares for her own sati . Determined to apply the “godly might of English justice” and uphold a law banning the practice, an English doctor and magistrate muscle in to stop her. In an 11th-hour volte face, Jayanti, desiring life over the afterlife, allows herself to be saved. Triumphant, the magistrate suggests she become his mistress, but instead she opts to be shipped off to Trinidad. The island, she’s told, is a place where the shame of her choice will be forgotten.

Ever Since We Small, Celeste Mohammed’s second novel-in-stories, is a more cohesive work than Pleasantview, which won the Bocas prize for Caribbean literature in 2022. The opening chapter follows on from an academic introduction and Mohammed’s style is more reverent, less ballsy and humorous, than the warts-and-all portraits drawn in Pleasantview; but casting characters from the distant past often has that effect on novelists. The tone is appropriate, however; Mohammed here is the sober observer taking in the fate of women like Jayanti, who if they have choices at all, they are between bad and worse.