My friend Ken Chubb, who has died aged 80, was the founder, along with his wife, Shirley Barrie, of the London-based Wakefield Tricycle theatre company in 1972. Eight years later he and Shirley set up the Tricycle theatre in north-west London to provide a permanent base for the company’s productions.

Working with a small team of actors, Ken was the theatre’s artistic director for four years from its foundation, until he and Shirley returned to their native Canada. Over that period, and before that with the travelling company, he was a notable champion of new plays by writers such as Sam Shepard, John Antrobus and Olwen Wymark .

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The annual award for aspiring cartoonists – which now boasts its own evening event – offers the chance to be published in the Observer and win £1,000, with past winners landing book and film deals

This year, we have decided to launch the annual Faber/Observer/Comica graphic short story prize with an event as well as an announcement: an evening that will hopefully be highly enjoyable for anyone who has followed the progress of the award, as well as helpful to those who might be thinking of entering this time around. On 9 April, then, come along to the Bindery in Hatton Garden, London, where a panel will discuss graphic novels in general and our prize in particular – tickets are still available. On stage will be last year’s brilliant judges, Luke Healy and Posy Simmonds, as well as Lesley Imgart, who won the 2024 prize for her charming, funny comic Witch Way? . The event will be chaired by me, and I hope to see you there.

But back to the details of 2025. As ever, the winner of the prize will receive a cheque for £1,000 and his or her work will appear in the New Review in print and online (the award for the runner-up is £250, and their story will also be published online). Perhaps the bigger thing, however, is that both will know that their work was admired by our two guest judges: Aimée de Jongh, whose graphic adaptation of William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies was published to such acclaim last year; and Jonathan Coe, whose wonderful novels include What a Carve Up! , The Rotters’ Club and The Proof of My Innocence . This is the 18th year of the prize, and we’re so happy to have them.

To book tickets for Celebrating the Graphic Novel at the Bindery, London EC1, click here

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On Celebheights.com, thousands of users measure the statures of the rich and famous. The methods are scientific and the debates are fiery

As someone brushing up on 6’3”, height is one physical insecurity I’ve never agonised over. Instead, it’s a source of frustration as I crunch my legs into airplane seats and wait for them to go numb.

Only after discovering Celebheights.com did I truly understand the depth of feeling – both excitement and rage – that height can inspire.

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James McArdle plays a novelist whose care-giving duties are suddenly expanded in this nicely acerbic remake of Italian hit Mid-August Lunch

A frazzled, thirtysomething gay novelist, Edward (James McArdle) is preparing for a tour of the US to promote his latest book, a hotly tipped coming-of-age story. But there’s a problem: Edward is the primary carer for his elderly mum, Alma ( Fionnula Flanagan ). Alma is recovering from a stroke that has robbed her of her speech but not the ability to make her many opinions on Edward’s life forcefully clear. Edward’s situation is further complicated when his three friends decide to take a weekend break to Gran Canaria for Maspalomas Pride, unceremoniously offloading their mams on the doorstep of the boxy Dublin semi Edward shares with Alma.

Co-written by director Darren Thornton with his brother Colin and loosely based on Gianni Di Gregorio’s hit Italian comedy-drama Mid-August Lunch (2008) , Four Mothers is a charmer of a picture that lures us in with Edward’s angst but hits its stride when it digs into the dynamics between the four women who run Edward ragged with their catering requests and incessant bickering. What could have been a sentimental plodder gets a pleasingly acerbic tang from the bracing cattiness of the dialogue.

In UK and Irish cinemas

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The author’s sharply intelligent history of how black British identity was forged beyond London in the cauldron of the Thatcherite 1970s and 80s is a necessary corrective

“It’s so hard to create something when there has been nothing before,” the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate VS Naipaul once complained to me, referring to his work for the BBC World Service programme Caribbean Voices (1943-58). That sentiment, that each generation of black Britons believes themselves to be bold pioneers working in a vacuum, has persisted since the beginning of mass migration to this country.

But what if the contributions of black Britons were not carelessly neglected, but rather, as Lanre Bakare identifies in his estimable first book, We Were There, a history that has been more purposely obscured?

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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’

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For many of us, the United States means music, progress, hope. Whatever their president does, plenty of Americans continue to believe in those too

It seems as inevitable as the economic chaos let loose by Donald Trump’s mad avalanche of tariffs : a precipitous drop in the number of tourists visiting the US, which is now forecast to be even worse than initially feared. In February, overseas travel to the country was down by 5% compared with the previous year – and, now, reputable forecasters are predicting a drop of nearly twice that size.

We all know why. Trump’s hostile words about Canada and Mexico have hit the US’s top two markets for tourism. Finnish, German and Danish transgender and non-binary people have been advised by their governments to contact a US diplomatic mission before travelling there. Note also a trickle of reports about outsiders falling foul of the cruel stringency apparently now gripping the American authorities: a 28-year-old woman from north Wales held for 19 days in a detention centre and escorted on to her plane home in chains; the French scientist who was summarily denied entry into the US after his phone was found to contain messages criticising the president. Those stories intensify the Trump administration’s general air of brutality and belligerence, which also brings familiar fears to the surface: of guns, politicised thuggery and a country in a frighteningly volatile state. The result is the sudden understanding of the US as somewhere that may be best unvisited – which, for millions of people, brings on a very painful pang of loss.

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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.

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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.

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