Only two debut albums – including the ‘token’ jazz release – feature among this year’s list of nominations for the coveted UK and Irish music prize

A raft of familiar names fill this year’s list of Mercury prize nominations, with only two debuts among the 12 shortlisted albums. In Limerence , the first full-length by the Scottish folk songwriter Jacob Alon, and Hamstrings and Hurricanes, the first by Welsh jazz musician Joe Webb, will compete with the likes of Pulp’s comeback album More , folk godfather Martin Carthy’s Transform Me Then Into a Fish and the UK’s biggest-selling new album of the year so far, People Watching by Sam Fender.

The list is split 50/50 between male and female or mixed acts. The solo female artists on the list tend to the iconoclastic: Irish pop star CMAT’s acclaimed third album Euro-Country , Leeds jazz musician Emma-Jean Thackray’s Weirdo , FKA twigs’ Eusexua and PinkPantheress’s mixtape Fancy That . As for bands, as well as Pulp, the Irish band Fontaines DC ( Romance ) and London four-piece Wolf Alice ( The Clearing ) appear.

We would like to hear from visitors to the V&A East Storehouse about their highlights from the exhibition

The V&A has launched a new exhibition space, the V&A East Storehouse in East London, where visitors can choose from over 250,000 objects and have one delivered to a room for a private viewing.

A recent addition to the collection is the David Bowie Centre , containing the singer’s archive.

This novel fizzes with energy as it follows the parallel lives of two siblings and exposes the crushing divides of gender and class

I admired Dur e Aziz Amna’s precise and lyrical first novel, American Fever ; the protagonist – an exchange student from Pakistan to rural Oregon – staying with me long after I encountered her. She has now delivered a superb second novel that features another fascinating central character, though in a much darker, more disturbing context.

A Splintering is the story of Tara, one of five siblings from a poor farming family in the hinterlands of Pakistani Punjab. This is the kind of landscape where age-old codes of manhood, with brother or son as provider and adjudicator of women’s lives, still rule. Tara, gazing at the stars from their courtyard at night, wants to get away from the squalor of Mazinagar (literally, past city), where most people live and die unnoticed, and build a life full of money and possessions in the city. She has no romantic notions about the soporific countryside. “I have no nobility. I come from darkness and filth.”

Based on a true story, Offerman plays an ‘sovereign citizen’ extremist pitted against Quaid’s police chief in this uncomfortably chilly drama

For a film about rage, this is a rather chilly, uncomfortable drama. It’s inspired by the true-life story of Jerry and Joseph Kane , father and son anti-government extremists; Jerry was a self-proclaimed “sovereign citizen” who believed that the government was illegitimate and he could decide which laws to opt out of. He’s played here by Nick Offerman (Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation), giving a vein-popping, fist-clenchingly believable performance. We see Jerry’s boiling inferno through the eyes of his son Joe (Jacob Tremblay), a quiet, thoughtful teenager urged by his dad to be an independent thinker (so long as he thinks the same as Jerry).

It is Arkansas, 2010. Sixteen-year-old Joe opens the door to a sheriff handing him an eviction notice; his dad is behind on the mortgage payments. Even when he has the money, Jerry won’t pay the bank on principle. He’s a minor celebrity, a regular on right-wing radio stations, travelling the midwest in a white suit like a cheap preacher giving seminars on how to avoid mortgage foreclosures (a hat gets passed around at the end for donations).

Instead of recognising that social media harms mental health and democracy, the former deputy PM and Meta executive repeats company talking points

Nick Clegg chooses difficult jobs. He was the UK’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, a position from which he was surely pulled in multiple directions as he attempted to bridge the divide between David Cameron’s Conservatives and his own Liberal Democrats. A few years later he chose another challenging role, serving as Meta’s vice-president and then president of global affairs from 2018 until January 2025, where he was responsible for bridging the very different worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington DC (as well as other governments). How to Save the Internet is Clegg’s report on how he handled that Herculean task, along with his ideas for how to make the relationships between tech companies and regulators more cooperative and effective in the future.

The main threat that Clegg addresses in the book is not one caused by the internet; it is the threat to the internet from those who would regulate it. As he puts it: “The real purpose of this book is not to defend myself or Meta or big tech. It is to raise the alarm about what I believe are the truly profound stakes for the future of the internet and for who gets to benefit from these revolutionary new technologies.”

The German city is celebrating the renowned art school’s centenary with exhibitions, digital tours and bike and bus routes connecting landmark Bauhaus buildings

The heat hits me as soon as I open the door, the single panes of glass in the wall-width window drawing the late afternoon sunlight into my room. The red linoleum floor and minimalist interior do little to soften the impact; I wonder how I’m going to sleep. On the opposite side of the corridor, another member of the group I’m travelling with has a much cooler studio, complete with a small balcony that I immediately recognise from archive black and white photographs.

Unconsciously echoing the building’s past, we start using this as a common room, perching on the tubular steel chairs, browsing the collection of books on the desk and discussing what it must have been like to live here. At night, my room stays warm and noise travels easily through the walls and stairwells; it’s not the best night’s rest I’ve ever had, but it’s worth it for the experience.

The veteran actor will be reprising his role as a priest who helps Diesel’s immortal warrior stop the plague in The Last Witch Hunter 2

The actor Michael Caine has again come out of retirement for one last job – in this case, Vin Diesel sequel The Last Witch Hunter 2. Caine will be reprising his role as a priest who assists the immortal warrior played by Diesel to stop the plague ravaging the planet.

Caine, 92, first retired in 2009, after shooting gang crime drama Harry Brown and then again, 24 films later, in 2021, after starring as novelist in Best Sellers. He returned for little-seen Croatian historical drama Medieval in 2022 and, the following year, starred in The Great Escaper as a D-Day veteran who travels to Normandy solo from his care home for the 70th anniversary.

In a glittering career spanning more than four decades his vision contributed to some of the most memorable worlds in cinematic history

Stuart Craig, the multi-Oscar winning production designer for The English Patient, The Elephant Man and the Harry Potter films, has died aged 83.

His family told the Guardian he had died peacefully at home on Sunday after 14 years with Parkinson’s disease. “Our beloved husband and father, deeply loved and respected, was not only known for his talent but also for his kindness and we are moved by hearing of how many lives he touched. He will live on in our hearts forever.”

Private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) might just turn out to be Rian Johnson's greatest creation. Introduced in 2019's Knives Out , Blanc's syrupy Southern drawl and idiosyncratic approach to solving a mysterious New England death charmed audiences worldwide and launched a modern whodunnit franchise .

The third installment in the series, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery , has already garnered early rave reviews after screening at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) over the weekend. And now Netflix has released the official trailer, showcasing Blanc tackling the inexplicable death of a parish priest in a spookily Gothic small-town setting.

(Very minor spoilers for Knives Out and Glass Onion below.)

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