Turner prize nominee Delaine Le Bas says entrenched racist attitudes to community persist in UK and Europe

Roma, Gypsies and Travellers have not made as much progress as other minority groups in the UK because of deeply entrenched racist attitudes towards them, the Turner prize-nominated artist Delaine Le Bas has said.

Le Bas, who has spent her career exploring themes connected to her Romani Traveller heritage , said that Traveller communities have been “stuck in place” by stereotypes and hostile newspaper coverage.

On straight line missions, YouTubers jump fences, wade through rivers, and almost die in peat bogs. It’s completely pointless – and weirdly beautiful

Spending too much time on YouTube can be a dangerous game for men my age. Algorithmic gyres can pull you rightwards – towards misogynistic extremes and away from the parts of the internet that build connections and foster consensus.

Thankfully the rabbit hole I fell down led me – in a perfectly straight line – towards a renewed sense of childlike adventure.

Orange Tree theatre, London
Camaraderie, comedy and a love of the trade shine through in April De Angelis’s group portrait of Nell Gwyn and the other female actors who were the first to be permitted on the English stage

April De Angelis’s 1993 play is more a snapshot than a coloured-in portrait of the first cohort of women to be permitted on to the stage. Still, it is an entertaining and enlightening ensemble work that captures the delicate moment in 17th-century stage history when these pioneering women straddled empowerment and economic independence with sexual objectification and hostile moral judgement.

Nell Gwyn, played spiritedly by Zoe Brough, is famously known to be among these early female actors, but De Angelis draws out several others stories and plaits five lives together, on and off stage. There is Mrs Betterton (Anna Chancellor, giving a glinting performance), something of an elder who brims with stage wisdom and technique; Mrs Marshall (Katherine Kingsley), a steely type whose former affair with an earl has left her vulnerable to heckling and attack; Mrs Farley (Nicole Sawyerr), who starts off as a soapbox Christian before taking to the stage; and finally Doll (Doña Croll), who assists them.

It has hosted a huge spider and a pickled shark – and despite financial pressures, there can be little doubt about the gallery’s seismic impact

Opening night at Tate Modern, 25 years ago this May, was the kind of party that defines an era. Stars of the arts world and politics, including prime minister Tony Blair, attended. All of them were dwarfed by a giant ­spider – Louise Bourgeois’s visiting sculpture – perched on the gangway over the vast, packed Turbine Hall.

For Alex Beard, particular joyous moments still stand out, but not just from the evening: “It was a remarkable night, but I most clearly remember the first morning, 12 May, when I walked around outside, really early doors, and saw people lining up right around the building. I talked to the first person in the queue, who told me this was something they’d been waiting for all their life,” recalls Beard, who was deputy director of Tate.

The ‘class clown’ from the racy BBC sitcom discusses his return to the stage, the draw of the dark side and preparing his parents to see him in ‘full bum’ nudity on screen

For the past five weeks, Joshua McGuire has been in a whitewashed room in north London pretending to be a rhinoceros. The 37-year-old actor isn’t in a performance art piece or strange social experiment, but rather starring in director Omar Elerian’s new production of Eugene Ionèsco’s 1959 absurdist play, Rhinoceros ; it is his first stage role in seven years. “It sounds mental but it’s the theatre of the absurd, so it’s meant to be baffling at points,” he says with a smile, back in human form in a white T-shirt and cap while on a break from rehearsals, where he is clearly enjoying taking on the story of a small French town whose inhabitants gradually turn into rhinos.

If you have watched a British comedy over the past decade, it’s likely you’ve seen McGuire in it. The endlessly energetic performer is usually found next to the leading man, sporting a frizz of curly hair and delivering anxious one-liners or slapstick pratfalls. He has featured in everything from Netflix series Lovesick to Richard Curtis’s About Time and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn . On stage, meanwhile, he had his breakthrough in Laura Wade’s 2010 satire on the British upper classes, Posh , playing a member of a fictionalised version of the Bullingdon Club, and has since starred opposite Daniel Radcliffe in David Leveaux’s 50th anniversary production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead .

The inspiring makeover of a 1960s Utrecht college at less than half the cost of a new building and a third the carbon footprint is among projects in the Netherlands that can teach the UK vital lessons in sustainability

‘The greenest building,” to quote a slogan now popular among architects, “is one that is already built.” It sums up the belated realisation that the carbon impact and energy consumption of demolition and new building can be more significant than those of heating, cooling and running a building when it’s in use. It’s still a principle that is only patchily put into practice, in the UK and elsewhere. But the Dutch not-for-profit organisation Mevrouw Meijer (meaning Mrs Meijer), which works to give new life to old school buildings, is quietly showing how it can be done.

Her organisation’s approach, says its founder, Wilma Kempinga, makes environmental, financial and practical sense, but it’s also about the experiences and memories of childhood. “It’s very important that students experience beauty,” she says. “This is a place you will remember for the rest of your life.” For Kempinga, beauty is best achieved by making the most of existing buildings – even those thought unremarkable – and getting the best young architects to design the transformation.

After a horrifying crash, Billy Monger lost both his legs at 17. But from dancing on Strictly to setting a world record in the Ironman, he’s still powering ahead. Just don’t call him an ‘inspiration’…

When Billy Monger signed up to compete in the 2024 Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii, he knew almost nothing about the event. But after a morning genning up on YouTube, the 25-year-old from Surrey was left pretty well traumatised. Straight away, there were the distances involved:

Even the hardiest professional athletes describe Kona as one of the most extreme single-day endurance events in the world. For Monger, who has been a double amputee since losing both legs in a horror motor-racing crash in 2017, the challenge seemed almost insurmountable. Before the event, he didn’t even really know how to do front crawl. Since his accident, the furthest that Monger had run was 5km, before the discomfort around his prosthetics became too much and he had to stop and remove his leg sockets.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a fan of Jane Austen must be in want of festivities to mark her big birthday. Here are some of the best

Southampton has a significant part to play in the Austen story: after the death of her father in 1805, she moved with her mother and sister to live in the city for three years, taking a house on Castle Square. The Jane Austen Heritage Trail links eight sites around the city that the younger Jane would have known, including the Dolphin Hotel (currently facing an uncertain redevelopment future) where she attended a ball to celebrate her 18th birthday ( visitsouthampton.co.uk/janeausten250 ).

Barbican, London
The Australian Chamber Orchestra played with fearlessness, curiosity and style in music by Bach, Shostakovich and, most poignantly, Sofia Gubaidulina, who died earlier this month

Concerts don’t usually start before the ensemble arrive on stage, but the Australian Chamber Orchestra aren’t your usual orchestra. Most pianists don’t warm up for their concerto with a cameo on continuo harpsichord, either – but Alexander Melnikov isn’t most pianists.

Bach’s Ricercar a 6 from The Musical Offering exploded into life with most musicians still in motion. Arranged by ACO’s director, violinist Richard Tognetti, the opening was starkly dissonant. Bow attacks were vicious (more rhythm than pitch), the tone both supremely blended and anarchically nasty. That’s the thing about an elite ensemble whose 17 core string players perform on exceptionally valuable historic instruments : if you can weave magic from gut and horsehair – and their Ricercar also featured passages of liquid smoothness and an ending with vivid, organ-like intensity – then ugliness becomes another expressive effect.