Could you be the world’s next worm-charming champion? Or maybe toe wrestling is more your thing? These (real) sports are ripe with joyful eccentricity – but for contestants and supporters, it’s serious competition

‘The sheer madness of it is the appeal’

Continue reading...

Book highlights performer’s wartime contribution and how she used her fame to provide cover and promote equal rights

She was, according to US wartime counter-intelligence officer Lt Paul Jensen, “our No 1 contact in French Morocco”, supporting the allied mission “at great risk to her own life – and I mean that literally. We would have been quite helpless without her.”

The British intelligence agent Donald Darling had her down as an especially “cherished agent of [Charles] de Gaulle’s government”. Well aware of her importance, the UK foreign intelligence service MI6 called her “the pet lady agent” of the Free French.

Continue reading...

As the third season of the social satire draws to its finale, the costumes featured in the series are selling out fast

The third season of The White Lotus finishes on Monday, marking the end of group chats and column inches devoted to the Thai hotel and its super-rich guests.

While some of this chatter has been dedicated to theories of who kills who in the finale , or the alleged fallout between creator Mike White and composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer , a lot is focused on something else – the fashion.

Continue reading...

A top student’s A-level celebrations are overshadowed by bad news in Sasha Nathwani’s Berlinale prize-winning British film

Some actors take a while to capture your attention; others grab you by the eyes the moment you first encounter them. Kurdish-British actor Deba Hekmat falls into the second category. Her debut, a supporting role in Luna Carmoon’s Hoard (2024), was electrifying – there’s a semi-feral, unfettered physicality to her performance that chimes perfectly with Carmoon’s maverick vision.

In Sasha Nathwani’s Berlin film festival prize-winning Last Swim , Hekmat gets the starring role of Ziba, a high-achieving A-level student whose carefully planned day of celebration with her friends is clouded by an ominous diagnosis and a question mark over the future. Sunny, soulful, if a little montage-heavy at times, this is a more conventional film. Hekmat’s magnetic star quality, though, is unmistakable: she’s a free and fascinating presence.

In UK and Irish cinemas

Continue reading...

The latest book from artist Lee Shulman, who has created the world’s largest private collection of amateur colour transparencies, has an often startling sartorial focus

It started with an impulsive eBay purchase. When Lee Shulman received the box of vintage slides he had bought from an anonymous seller, the British visual artist and film-maker could not believe the treasure he had accidentally uncovered. Beyond the impeccable quality of each image, taken in the 1950s by unnamed photographers, these were glimpses at everyday moments from everyday lives long since lost. Birthdays, family gatherings, holidays, parties, graduations – once cherished memories lovingly captured but now forgotten.

Bought in 2017, that box was the catalyst for what Shulman refers to as a “complete obsession”. More than 1m slides, 14 publications and a dozen international exhibitions later, The Anonymous Project has grown into a global endeavour and the 51-year-old’s life’s work. This ever-expanding archive of Kodachrome – a once groundbreaking but now defunct colour film released by Kodak in the mid-1930s – now represents the world’s largest private collection of amateur colour slides.

Continue reading...

A young writer who becomes a London sex worker for the sake of his art gets much more than he bargained for

At first it’s just research: aspiring writer Max (Ruaridh Mollica) tentatively ventures into sex work to gather material for his first novel, about a rent boy named Sebastian. But then the side hustle becomes the primary source of income after Max loses his job.

This handsomely shot, London-set sexual odyssey is just starting to get a little repetitive (there are only so many anonymous hotel room blowjobs we need, however pleasingly they are lit) when Max meets Nicholas (Jonathan Hyde), a cultured, much older man. A connection develops between them that goes far deeper than the contract between sex worker and client. It’s tender, thoughtful film-making from Finnish director Mikko Mäkelä, exploring the bond between two men separated by generations but joined by literature and love.

In UK and Irish cinemas

Continue reading...

Tron theatre, Glasgow
Martin O’Connor’s witty and provocative show casts the 18th-century equivalent of the Hitler Diaries in a fresh light

Martin O’Connor calls it “the first Outlander effect”. He is thinking about how an image of a country catches on and, factual or otherwise, comes to define it.

Just as the sexed-up Highland romance of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander projected a view of Scotland with questionable historical grounding so, in 1760, James Macpherson captivated the literary world with his rediscovered verses translated from the third-century Gaelic of the poet Ossian.

Continue reading...

Jones plays the schoolmaster who spotted the Welsh actor’s raw potential in Marc Evans’s sluggish drama

Inspiring teacher cliches abound in Mr Burton , a drab, slag-heap-grey drama about the early life of the actor Richard Burton ( Harry Lawtey ), born Richard Jenkins in industrial south Wales in 1925. The Burton of the title is not the hot-headed teenage aspiring actor who we meet bunking with his sister’s family in Port Talbot, but rather the sympathetic teacher Philip Burton ( Toby Jones ), who spotted the schoolboy’s potential and coached him to extract the full value from his vowel sounds.

The always impressive Jones gives a satisfyingly fleshed-out turn as a closeted gay man forced to contend with whispers, rumours and outright hostility. And Lawtey, while way too old to convincingly pass as a schoolboy, has occasional flashes of Burton’s dangerous charisma. It’s a pity, then, that this sluggishly paced film, which leans heavily on a fussy, twinkling piano score, is so meandering and listless.

In UK and Irish cinemas

Continue reading...

A bereaved woman forms new relationships in the author’s first novel in seven years, a tender and funny tale of forgiveness

Paulette, the protagonist of Kit de Waal’s latest novel, isn’t perfect: she can be judgmental and stubborn; she often speaks sharply; and she probably drinks too much Appleton rum. But De Waal’s candid narration makes it difficult not to love her.

The Best of Everything is the Birmingham-born author’s sixth book and her first novel for adults since 2018’s The Trick to Time . She made her name with her 2016 debut, My Name Is Leon , which established her as a writer full of heart.

Continue reading...