The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

This month, Art on the Underground is unveiling a new artwork at Stratford station, London, by the Kurdish artist Ahmet Öğüt, entitled Saved by the Whale’s Tail, Saved by Art. It was inspired by a metro accident outside Rotterdam in which the train overran the elevated station stop, but was saved from plunging into the water below by a 10-metre-high sculpture of a whale’s tail, one of two placed there by artist Maarten Struijs. There were no passengers on board, and the driver managed to escape unharmed.

Was this a one-off? Have there been other works of art that have played a rescue role? Or is their potential for salvation solely restricted to the spiritual? Astrid, Coventry

Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, London
Though his slick country is more Jon Bon Jovi that Johnny Cash, there’s only one artist who could unite rock, rap and twang with such effortless panache

Post Malone’s been on quite the journey since he debuted a decade ago rapping over trap beats with a voice soaked in laconic charisma and Auto-Tune (a lot of Auto-Tune). He’s duetted with Ozzy Osbourne, he livestreamed Nirvana covers for charity during lockdown. Now, on latest album F-1 Trillion, he’s gone country, explaining the preponderance among the audience of Stetsons and cowboy boots, doubtless getting their first airing since Beyoncé’s Country Carter shows here in June.

Tonight, Malone ricochets with chaotic panache between rock, trap and twang, never making a big deal out of it. To create this patchwork of supposedly divergent elements in a moment when the culture war is using such divisions to break America apart, feels almost political. His hand-picked opening act – fellow chart-topping rap-to-country convert Jelly Roll – references those divisions explicitly, offering his music as “medicine” and promising, on breakthrough hit I Am Not Okay, “it’s gonna be alright”.

Judged by Maggie O’Farrell, Ben Miles and Chigozie Obioma, the Hilary Mantel prize for fiction will recognise emerging talent, and pay tribute to the Wolf Hall author’s legacy

A few months after Hilary Mantel died in September 2022, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell was browsing in a bookshop. Stopping at a table of new novels, she noticed a couple with Mantel’s endorsement on the cover, which, she tells me, she generally regards as instantly justifying the book’s price. This time, though, “I suddenly thought there aren’t going to be many more of these. It was such a sad moment. We’re not going to get another Mantel book, and we’re also not going to get to know about the books that she read and loved.”

To many readers who gobbled up Mantel’s books – 17 of them, including the novel Beyond Black , and the Wolf Hall trilogy , which won two Booker prizes – it’s extraordinary that she found time or energy for anything beside the mammoth research that her vast historical enterprises entailed, not to mention her enthusiastic and detailed involvement in their various adaptations. But Mantel was an engaged and enthusiastic supporter of other writers, especially those in the crucial early stages of their careers. Perhaps she never forgot how long it took her to see the first novel she wrote, A Place of Greater Safety , finally emerge in print in 1992.

From depression to obesity, the concept of ‘evolutionary mismatch’ can help foster self-compassion and point the way to a more rewarding existence

One of the fascinating things about working as a psychotherapist is the opportunity to observe how many of our problems involve us getting in the way of ourselves. The difficulties we encounter are frequently the result of self-sabotage, and managing them often requires wrestling with our own drives, doing our best not to give in to every impulse. This is easier said than done, of course. To lose weight and keep it off, to successfully climb out of debt, to find meaningful work, to maintain long-term, happy relationships: all demand postponing our immediate desires in the service of a longer-term goal.

Delaying gratification, as it’s called, has been a useful tactic for aeons. But at a certain point it becomes reasonable to ask: why does so much of modern life seem to involve swimming upstream? Why is it that following our instincts often seems to land us in so much trouble?

Soho theatre, London
The standup has some effective material about the usual middle-aged gripes, but never quite coalesces these scattershot routines into a well-rounded whole

Nobody ever listens to what put-upon mums have to say, says Esther Manito , and she’s here to put that right with a touring show, Slagbomb, about the harried domestic life of an Essex fortysomething. With a husband who never listens, a hormonal daughter and a son refusing to grant her – even when she’s on the loo – a moment’s peace, Manito is reporting back from the frontline of unglamorous family life. And she fashions from it effective standup too, even if it starts to feels one-note, and resists our host’s efforts, never very convincing, to shape it into more than the sum of its parts.

Those parts can be effective as stand-alone routines. There’s a reliably amusing number about her infant son leaving her exposed in the toilet of a Mexican restaurant. There’s a bit about easyJet’s baggage restrictions that makes up for in ardour and comic exaggeration what it lacks in originality. There are also first-base routines, like the one about sex education in the 90s, and weak punchlines, like the “space cakes” line wrapping up a section on her kids’ dressing-up days at school. I also found Manito’s scornful persona a bit two-dimensional, at least in the show’s first half, where everything is “the next load of bollocks” – like her holiday to Skegness, where “it’s windy, it’s raining, and it’s shit”.

On some level, I realised it was a bit unhinged, writes the author and podcaster Elizabeth Day. But what did I have to lose?

On 29 December 2022, I received a text. ‘Hi mum I’m texting you off a friends phone I’ve smashed mine and their phones about to die, can you WhatsApp my new number x’ I was in a rental car when I got it, my partner at the wheel next to me as we drove down an anonymous stretch of motorway. Both the sky and the road were grey. It was that indeterminate space between Christmas and New Year when the days become sludgy and diffuse; a time when teenagers meet up with their friends to go shopping or gather in each other’s homes and post Snapchats or exchange festive gossip while pretending not to vape. It was the time of waiting – for the next thing to happen, for the promised excitement of New Year’s Eve and snogging underneath leftover mistletoe. So it wasn’t a particularly unusual text to receive, especially not given the trademark adolescent lack of grammar and punctuation.

There was just one thing.

Everyman theatre, Liverpool
Ellie Hurt directs a dynamic production that boasts sensational lead performances by Zoe West and Alicia Forde

Romeo and Juliet is a play that lives or dies by the speed of its execution. Directors are best off ignoring the Friar’s observation “they stumble that run fast” and Ellie Hurt rightly puts pedal to the metal in her vigorous production. Not for nothing is Zoe West’s Romeo wearing Nike trainers.

The first act is breathtaking, the adrenaline sustained right from the opening brawl through to the Capulets’ ball. Romeo’s reflections on Rosaline with Benvolio (Kelise Gordon-Harrison) are fizzier than usual; the Nurse ( Ebony Feare ) is hurried out of giving her lament for Susan; and instead of trying to calm tempers, Joe Alessi’s hard-nut Capulet is ready to glass Tybalt (Milo McCarthy) with a bottle of bubbly. As the party rages, Mercutio (Elliot Broadfoot) grabs the mic to reprise lines from the Queen Mab speech like it’s a dance anthem, Mab’s drumming of a soldier’s ear turned into clubby beats.

The 85-year-old actor talks the legacy of his stirring 1975 drama, his love of YouTube, fake death rumours and why he won’t discuss politics

The lions of 1970s cinemas are now lions in winter. “I’m so sad about Redford,” says Al Pacino, a day after the death of Robert Redford , his fellow octogenarian actor. “I liked him so much. He was such a sweetheart.”

Perhaps it is because he is currently filming King Lear that Pacino is preoccupied with our collective crawl toward death. He recently rewatched his younger self in Dog Day Afternoon, a Hollywood classic that celebrates its 50th anniversary on Sunday, and was struck by how many of the cast are now gone.

As the planet’s ruling class embraces displays of royal-adjacent wealth, a new exhibition about Marie Antoinette is opening at London’s V&A. Why is the French fashion icon suddenly back in vogue?

Marie Antoinette: the Fragonard cupcake who bankrupted France with her lust for fashion and diamonds, who bottle-fed pet lambs while her people starved. No matter that, in truth, her frocks and jewels were small fry in her country’s financial ruin; the optics, as we would say now, were terrible. So what if she never actually said “let them eat cake” – history is no match for a great soundbite. But while opulence hastened Marie Antoinette’s downfall, it has also brought her immortality. Only Cleopatra rivals her as the most glamorous queen in history.

Even as she was driven to the scaffold, an ignominious jerky ride by open ox cart through crowds of jeering Parisians, the last queen of France knew the power of fashion. Marie Antoinette had worn only black since the death of her husband nine months earlier, defying a Jacobin ban on the wearing of a colour associated with the monarchy. But on the morning of 16 October 1793, she dressed in a pristine white chemise, petticoat, dress and bonnet. The febrile fury of a hungry and angry people had already torn her reputation to shreds – she was denounced in the press as a whore, a child abuser, a barely human “she-wolf” – but knowing that all eyes, still, were on her clothes, she protested her innocence to the last in the best way she knew.