In attempting to contextualise the murky evolution of freedom of expression, the British historian has instead given encouragement to authoritarians of all stripes

The top blurb on Fara Dabhoiwala’s new book describes it as a “remarkable global history of free speech”. But it isn’t, and throwing in an interesting chapter on the press in British-occupied India, a tedious one on 18th-century Scandinavian free-speech laws and referring to the French Revolution doesn’t really make it one.

No, it’s a polemical account of the evolution of American first-amendment exceptionalism (which the author, as we shall see, regards as an entirely bad thing), with most of the globe entirely omitted. You suspect the author all the way through of having what Keats called “palpable designs” on you, but you don’t fully catch up with his intentions until towards the end.

Thirty years after the film, the musical version makes no excuses for being a nostalgia-fest

Who needs to learn to park? “Everywhere you go has valet!” Cher Horowitz, teen heroine of 1995 cult movie Clueless , is one of the most spoilt and entitled characters ever to have appeared on screen. She is also, with her irrepressible urge to solve other people’s problems and her coltish steps towards self-knowledge, one of the most endearing. Millennial women like me, who grew up watching the movie again at every sleepover, will defend her against all comers.

Now, Clueless is the latest millennial coming-of-age movie to hit the West End as a stage musical, opening to critics last week at Trafalgar Theatre. It follows Mean Girls and The Devil Wears Prada, both of which opened in London last year, each built to replicate the success of the repeatedly revived Legally Blonde: The Musical . (Sadly, Jennifer Coolidge has yet to cameo.)

In Germany, tariff-hit car factories are being repurposed for defence. In Britain, American academics are queueing up for jobs. The west will be different as a result of Trump – but will it be worse?

The German ­electronics firm Hensoldt has a backlog of orders for its technology, ­including radars that protect Ukraine from Russian airstrikes. Meanwhile, Germany’s car industry is struggling with low European demand and competition from China.

As Europe worries about how it can weather the economic and ­political turmoil unleashed by Donald Trump, executives from Munich and Düsseldorf say they have at least a partial answer.

Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s enchanting eco-fable about a lone moggy in a flooded world is a triumph of imagination over budget

Animation as a medium and fairytales as a subject have always been natural bedfellows. You only need to look at Disney’s princess industrial complex to understand that sparkle-dusted happily-ever-after is big business; that the appetite for this particular breed of magical thinking (plus associated merchandising and sequined tat) is enduringly healthy. But the beguiling, Oscar-winning , dialogue-free Latvian animation Flow , which tells of a solitary cat who must learn to cooperate with a mismatched pack of other species to survive a catastrophic flood, is a little different.

The fairytale here is not the story the picture tells – it’s the story of the film itself. Created by a tiny team with a minuscule budget of about £3m, and rendered entirely on the free open-source 3D software Blender , Flow has been on a journey: its premiere in Cannes; the haul of prizes (54 to date), culminating in the Oscar for best animated feature – that is the stuff of film industry fantasy.

In her new book, music writer Kate Mossman looks back at her favourite type of encounter – interviews with charismatic, ageing, male rockers. Here she remembers the band – and specifically drummer – who electrified her as a girl growing up in Norfolk

I am of a generation that had no name: we slipped down the crack between the spotty cheek of gen X and the well-moisturised buttock of the millennials. We are the last generation that will wow our grandchildren by explaining that we came of age completely without the internet. We wrote letters through secondary school; we replaced these with email when we got to university and wrote 15,000-word screeds to one another, which we still keep in files in our Hotmail accounts. Some of us ended up internet dating, but I have far more friends who settled down with their first or second love. We are neurotic, and depressive, but we didn’t know it until recently.

The thing we do share with those who came after is that when it comes to music, we and our parents have no generation gap. The great songwriters of the 1960s soundtracked our childhoods in their best-ofs and their unfashionable 80s incarnations. In my house, the “frog song” was given as much time as Sgt Pepper . Pop stars rose up like venerated family elders. Music was a communal activity; we were the cassette generation, and many families couldn’t afford to fly. We took long car ferry trips to France for our holidays, listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue in the Volvo.

A terrific second novel from the British author of Assembly examines what it means to be truthful – and who really benefits when facts come to light

Miriam Leonard, AKA Lenny, one of a tight core of characters at the heart of Natasha Brown’s terrific second novel, would probably dislike Universality intensely. Then again, she might love it, because an unpredictability of opinion is her stock in trade: a newspaper columnist who has recently sashayed from the comment pages of the Telegraph to those of the Observer , her views on class, race, sex, the economy and, latterly, the iniquity of diversity, equity and inclusion programmes are uncompromisingly held and vociferously broadcast, but only opaquely coherent. To keep moving is the trick.

Lenny is making a better fist of survival than many of those around her, with her exceptionally neat formula for wooing readers, which involves alighting on a news story and making “a lofty comparison”: “Obscure elements of European history are best, but a Russian novel or philosophical theory can be just as effective.” Certainly, she is faring better than disgraced banker Richard, cast out of his shiny-paned City office and his home in the Surrey stockbroker belt after a long read in which he has enthusiastically and, it turns out, foolhardily participated goes viral; the piece’s author, struggling freelance journalist Hannah, is briefly propelled to something approaching professional and personal respectability but finds herself similarly becalmed once the click-frenzy moves on. And neither of them would want to swap places with Jake, Lenny’s desperate and ne’er-do-well son (“a mass of wild hair, shambolic clothing and lifelong unaccountability”, she thinks grimly as she once again pushes him away), or with Pegasus, the aspiring communard whose utopian dream has irretrievably fractured.

Apparently we’re in ‘the Age of Anti-Ambition’ – but the ick we feel towards those who are openly wanting is misplaced

A series of photos that circulated around awards season made the internet roundly do its nut. I will describe them, and you will see how our reactions show that earnestness has gone violently out of style. The first picture accompanied a quote from Jeremy Strong responding to his Oscar nomination. He’d put out a long statement saying this was the “realisation of a lifelong dream” and shared a photo of himself as a kid in 1993, when he spent the night “on cold metal bleachers” outside the Academy Awards to watch the nominees arrive. “I have not lost that feeling of excitement… I have devoted my life to the attempt to do genuine work that would be worthy of this honour.”

The second was an Instagram post where Strong’s Succession co-star Kieran Culkin reacted to his competing nomination with champagne on a balcony in Paris, and the phrase, “Let’s fucking gooooooo.”

The trend for cultural reappraisal could risk upholding the very ideas it aims to dismantle

‘My quarrel with the English language,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare , had been “that the language reflected none of my experience.” And so “I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression”.

Then, he “began to see the matter in quite another way”: “Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.”

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