Popularity of traditional holiday memento hit by smartphones, ‘rude rock’ and rising price of stamps

A trip to the British seaside may not always have been something to write home about, but these days you might struggle even if you wanted to.

At the Little Gems gift shop in Blackpool town centre, all the usual seaside wares are on display – beach towels, plastic buckets and spades, sticks of rock – but one item is notably missing.

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Barclays’ analysis may be somewhat off the mark, but the megastar is tapping into a new trend in spending

Taylor Swift has long been credited with an outsized influence on music, celebrity culture – even politics. But reviving the UK’s flagging economy may be too much to ask, even of the sequinned megastar.

Research published by analysts from Barclays this week pointed to the extraordinary spending surge that ensues when Swift touches down, and suggested she could bring a £1bn boost to the UK.

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Beneath the famous hats was a prime mover in a British golden age, as a biopic is about to show

The legendary fashion editor Isabella Blow is remembered by her hats. A jewel-encrusted lobster which snaked back from her brow like a crustacean mohican. A miniature Chinese garden, complete with tiny eaved pagodas and lilliputian cherry trees with quivering blossoms. Her trademark was so distinctive that Princess Margaret once greeted her at a party with the words: “Good evening, Hat.” At her funeral in 2007, an 18th-century black galleon headpiece with delicate lace sails cascading from its lofty prow, created for her by her favourite milliner Philip Treacy, crowned her coffin on a bed of white roses.

But The Queen of Fashion, a newly announced biopic directed by Alex Marx with the Oscar-nominated actor Andrea Riseborough cast in the title role, is set to highlight Blow’s more serious role as a central figure in a golden age of British fashion, a kingmaker who launched the career of Alexander McQueen, and a powerhouse who helped put 1990s London at the centre of the creative world.

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Museum chair George Osborne hails ‘remarkable result’ as recovery effort continues with leads on another 100

The British Museum has located another 268 items that went missing or were stolen from its storerooms, bringing the total number recovered to 626.

About 2,000 items were found last year to be missing or lost , some of which had been sold on eBay.

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The country has been hit by decades of crises and catastrophe, but its culture continues to thrive across the diaspora. Here, Haitian musicians celebrate its ’sounds of freedom’

Even before March this year, when gun-toting gangs overran the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, dictatorships, poverty, health crises and earthquakes had defined the country in the eyes of global media. It passes for the archetypal failed state, a place where Unicef has declared that 3 million children urgently need humanitarian aid. Yet there is an alternative to this narrative of disaster and chaos: the beauty of Haitian culture. Music and visual art remain enduring symbols of hope.

Over the years, the population and its diaspora in North America have been extraordinarily creative. In the 80s, Jean-Michel Basquiat , whose father was Haitian, took the art scene by storm with his outre graffiti, otherworldly painting and barbed political commentary, while today Haitian-born artists Myrlande Constant and Frantz Zephirin are producing exhilarating canvases. Between the 1950s and 80s, musicians Nemours Jean-Baptiste, Coupé Cloué and Boukman Eksperyans excelled in genres such as compas, manba and rasin, which all have entrancing dance rhythms derived from Africa and provocative lyrics in the Creole language born of contact between French settlers and enslaved people.

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Theatre Royal Stratford East, London
The second, strikingly physical part of Lanre Malaolu ’s trilogy that began with Samskara explores bereavement with lightness as well as anguish

It is hard to define this arresting drama. It is a play that might also be a dance with words or a psychological musical. Whatever it is, movement is key to a show that is remarkable for its emotional punch, gut-wrenching performances and formal invention – even if it is sometimes opaque and leaves loose threads.

Written, choreographed and directed by Lanre Malaolu , it is in the same vein as Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy , whose first production was staged at around the same time that Malaolu created Samskara , also fusing dance with dialogue to explore 21st-century Black masculinity.

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Glyndebourne, East Sussex
Opening the 2024 festival, Diane Paulus’s staging relocates Bizet’s tragedy to a grim present day. Rihab Chaieb is a strong Carmen, Dmitry Cheblykov’s Escamillo shines but Dmytro Popov’s José doesn’t convince

‘A woman of deep courage and life and vitality who is struggling against the system for her freedom and will scale anything for that,” is how US director Diane Paulus describes Carmen in a programme interview for her new staging of Bizet ’s masterpiece.

The production, which opens this year’s Glyndebourne festival and dominates it with a season-long, double-cast run is an uneven piece of theatre, unsubtle and in-your-face where Bizet, one of opera’s great realists, is complex and probing, and at times curiously passionless for a work that can still present enormous challenges in its depiction of the irrational nature of desire.

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Cannes film festival
There isn’t much plot in Tyler Taormina’s very charming and rich movie about one huge family’s festivities, but it’s engrossing, exalted even

At first glance, there’s some reason to be suspicious of this film, with its possible nepo shenanigans. It’s about an extended blue collar family with a tinge of crime … and it features Francesca Scorsese, daughter of Martin. It’s also about the teeming warmth of a suburban American home, whose inhabitants seem on the verge of something epiphanic … and it features Sawyer Spielberg, son of Steven. But for all the influence-anxiety that anything like this carries with it, this is a very charming and rich movie, teeming with ambient detail, from very original and distinctive film-maker Tyler Taormina, whose previous picture Ham on Rye I very much admired.

Despite or because of the fact that almost nothing really happens in any conventionally dramatic sense, and that what might in another movie be considered background establishing detail here pretty much carries on for an hour and three quarters until the closing credits, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is unexpectedly beguiling and engrossing, with an almost experimental refusal of narrative in its normal sense. Like Ham on Rye, it is about hometown values, and the overwhelming but unquantifiable importance of that place where you started your life.

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Daf James’s life was upended when he and his husband adopted three kids – and he knew he had to write about it. As Lost Boys & Fairies hits the screen, the writer and cast talk about queer lives, Welshness and what makes a family click

Lost Boys & Fairies is not a true story. But like most drama and fiction, it draws heavily on the real-life experiences of the people who made it. Daf James, the Welsh playwright and screenwriter behind the story, also adopted three children with his husband when those children were aged between two and five. As in the show, he went to activity days to meet children who needed carers, got interrogated by social workers and had plenty of sleepless nights. So when we see his protagonist Gabriel getting hit in the head with a football by a seven-year-old in a Cardiff park, are we watching fiction here or reality?

“Everything I write is personally inspired,” Daf tells me, over Zoom from his attic bedroom, just minutes after we have both put our children to bed. “But I’ve learned how to adapt my lived experience into fiction. Andy is a fictitious character; the father is a fictitious character; the children are fictitious characters.” Andy, the saint-like husband of Gabriel, is played by Hawkeye star and Northern Irish actor Fra Fee, who tells me that his role in Lost Boys & Fairies was “genuinely the honour of my life”. It’s a statement that, like the show itself, hits a note of radical sentimentality. “I’ve never played a gay man on screen before,” Fee goes on, “which sounds a bit mad as a gay man myself. So to get the opportunity to do something that felt so positive was such a gift.”

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