Centuries later, Jamaican Patwa and US Gullah Creole retain many Africanisms adopted from enslaved people

• Illustrations by Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba

In 2000, I won a writing competition that awakened me to the depth and variety of Caribbean languages. As the Jamaica finalist for the My Caribbean essay competition, I joined more than 20 children from the region to form the youth delegation of the 24th Caribbean Tourism Conference in Bridgetown, Barbados.

I spent days with peers from islands that, until then, I did not know existed, such as the small but brilliant Sint Eustatius and Saba in the Leeward Islands. What I remember most are the simple greetings and phrases the other children and I taught one another in our different Creoles. Every child had an official language they wrote in to win their national competition – English, French, Dutch etc – but as soon as we were comfortable enough, we ditched those and shared as much as we could in our everyday tongues.

The standup comedian and broadcaster on realising he was funny, Parenting Hell and avoiding the spotlight

Born in south London in 1986, Rob Beckett is a comedian and broadcaster. He started on the standup circuit in 2009, performing at the Edinburgh fringe in 2012 with his show Rob Beckett’s Summer Holiday. Television quickly beckoned – after hosting ITV2’s I’m a Celebrity spin-off series, he became a panel-show regular, appearing on programmes including 8 Out of 10 Cats and Taskmaster, as well as the travel series Rob & Romesh vs … . In 2020, he launched the hit podcast Parenting Hell with comedian Josh Widdicombe. He is married and has two daughters. His current tour, Giraffe, continues until April 2026.

That’s my dad in the background but, aside from that, I’ve got no other details. It might have been on holiday, possibly at my dad’s mate’s place in Spain. We always went there – he gave it to us for cheap, but I’m not sure why. You don’t ask questions in my family.

The standup used to joke about not having kids, but then she had IVF and found herself an ‘eroded’ mother of two. Now she’s back with a show about motherhood in her 40s – but don’t expect any cute parenting stories

My favourite Sara Pascoe joke is her imaginary riposte to people asking if she’s going to have kids. They mean well, these prying parents – they just don’t want her to miss out on a life-enhancing experience. The thing is, the comedian has had some life-enhancing experiences of her own. “But I have never, ever said to anybody: ‘Oh, have you been on QI? Ahhh, you should go on QI!’” she insists, settling into her archly patronising pep talk. “No I didn’t think I wanted to be on QI until I was on QI, and then it was like I looked back and my entire life had been leading up to me being on QI. Yes it’s very tiring being on QI, but it’s so worth it. I just wouldn’t want you to leave it too late and they’ll have stopped making it!”

As a skewering of smug, insensitive acquaintances foisting their own ideas of fulfilment on a child-free woman in her 30s, it’s a gratifyingly clever joke. In reality, however, Pascoe wasn’t laughing. During the period she was doing that routine on stage, she was actually “quite sad about not being able to have children”, she says over coffee in a north London cafe near her home. She’d long suspected she had fertility issues after unsuccessfully trying for a baby with an ex-boyfriend.

Digital technology reveals ‘incredibly modern’ royal who lived 3,500 years ago in kingdom associated with Helen of Troy

She lived 3,500 years ago – but facial reconstruction technology has brought a woman from late bronze age Mycenae back to life.

The woman was in her mid-30s when she was buried in a royal cemetery between the 16th and 17th centuries BC. The site was uncovered in the 1950s on the Greek mainland at Mycenae, the legendary seat of Homer ’s King Agamemnon.

The pioneering V&A tea rooms were designed to draw people into culture, and today such spaces offer more than just sandwiches. Felicity Cloake introduces some of our favourites

At museums and galleries, the tourist imperative is often to tick off as much as possible, racing around desperately rather than setting aside the equally important time to take stock of it all over coffee and cake. But as well as being a respite from noisy school groups and other people’s opinions, these spaces serve other functions, too; a well-executed example draws people in in its own right, as Henry Cole, founding director of the V&A, was the first to realise.

Cole hoped his refreshment rooms, which opened in 1868, would encourage people to come in and enjoy some culture while they ate. The tradition continues to this day. Build it, add a decent cafe, and they will come … and they may even stay to check out the exhibitions. The best examples, like the Garden Cafe at Hospitalfield in Arbroath or the Open Kitchen Cafe at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, work to give you a sense of place, using local ingredients and recipes.

When Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998, lawyer Philippe Sands was part of the prosecution. As his book about the case comes out, he talks to the Colombian novelist about literature and justice

What do law and literature have in common? Do they represent similar impulses towards understanding human motives and behaviour, or are they fundamentally different systems? In his new book, 38 Londres Street , lawyer and writer Philippe Sands revisits the attempts to extradite and prosecute former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, beginning in 1998, in which he was involved. He also finds himself on the trail of Walther Rauff, a former SS officer featured in Sands’s award-winning book East West Street, who went on to seek refuge in Chile, later becoming involved in the Pinochet regime’s arrangements for the detention, torture and murder of its opponents. The Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who trained as a lawyer but decided instead to write journalism and fiction, has addressed political violence and its legacy throughout his work, including in his acclaimed novel The Shape of the Ruins . The two friends met to discuss excavating the past, the limits of law and the potential of art.

Philippe Sands: We’ve known each other for quite a few years, and you’re one of those rare people who straddles the worlds that I’ve fallen into: you understand the world of law with your legal qualification, and understand far better than I do the world of literature. But you’re also from the region I’m writing about. Having been to Chile for this book six or seven times, and about to head off again, I’m conscious of being an outsider. It’s a Chilean story, and this Brit has stumbled across it in various ways. It’s a local story for you.

Before she became a mother, Samantha Ellis secretly judged other parents who let their children subsist on white bread and pesto-pasta. And when her son was born she couldn’t wait to share the Iraqi Jewish food of her ancestors. Unfortunately, he had other ideas …

My family takes food very seriously. So seriously that when my mother’s family left Iraq in 1971, limited to 20kg of luggage each, they found room for not one but two rolling pins. The truth is that, having used the rolling pins, I think they were right. Born in England, I grew up on my father’s stories, too, of going to a Baghdad street stall to buy hot samoon , Iraqi bread shaped like a teardrop, with a puffy middle and a crunchy crust, with amba (mango pickle) oozing out of it. But he left Baghdad even earlier, in 1951, in a mass airlift along with most of Iraq’s Jews. I grew up in Britain, homesick for a place I’ve never been to, and will probably never see. There are now just three Jews left in Iraq.

Scattered across the world, we didn’t have much from Iraq, but we did have the recipes, which we clung to like a life raft. We didn’t just eat together but often cooked together, too. One of my earliest, happiest memories is of sitting under the Formica table in my grandmother’s kitchen at maybe three or four, and pulling the stalks off parsley so my mother and aunt could make tabbouleh . When, decades later, I was finally about to become a mother myself, I was excited about sharing Iraqi Jewish food with my son. Maybe he’d even want to be my tiny sous chef! Maybe he’d like tabbouleh as much as I did. We make it vivid green with barely any bulgur in it (I was confused when I first saw the pots of beige in the supermarket because they looked nothing like the salad I’d grown up with). Maybe he’d love ingriyi (fried aubergine slices layered with fried lamb or beef and sliced tomato, and simmered with turmeric, lemon juice and date syrup); and tbeet , which just means “overnight” because it was an ingenious dish developed to get around the restrictions on lighting fires or turning on ovens on Shabbat. The flame was kept very low, and chicken and rice were cooked through the night with cardamom, cinnamon and cloves, with eggs tucked around the chicken till they went a deep brown. I imagined if I made him kitchri , rice with red lentils, garlic, turmeric, cumin, tomato, melting onions, so much butter and melting slabs of halloumi, and thick yoghurt spooned over the top, he’d say ashteedek (long live your hands) in our language, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, and understand me when I replied awafi (to your health).

A lone vegetable stranded in a world of plastic transformed a trip to the supermarket into a photo opportunity

Ieva Gaile didn’t expect to take a photo on her trip to the supermarket. The lawyer, who lives in Vilnius, Lithuania, was working from home on the day and had popped next door for some lunch. When she spotted the errant cabbage placed atop a towering stack of water-bottle pallets, her reaction was instant.

“Since I began photography I’ve developed a habit of always observing my environment for interesting shots, andI thought it was beautiful visually,” Gaile says of this image, shortlisted in the Object category at the Sony World Photography awards 2025. “I liked the play of colours and repetition of green, and the contrast of textures: the wrinkled and imperfect surface of the cabbage against the synthetic shine of the plastic bottles.”

The actor on how an aside about sex became big news, getting let off for weed, and crying at adverts

Born in Edinburgh, Mark Bonnar, 56, studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. In 2017, he won a best actor Bafta Scotland for his role in Unforgotten, and his other TV work spans Line of Duty, Catastrophe and the Netflix series Department Q, which is released in May. His films include Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, Operation Mincemeat and Last Breath, which is out now. He is married to actor Lucy Gaskell, has two children and lives in Hertfordshire.

What is your greatest fear?
That we’re all going to hell in a handcart and Trump is driving.