The New World

PICK OF THE WEEK Fjord (selected cinemas)

When Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, both magnificent) move with their five children from Bucharest to a small fjordside village in western Norway, they have high hopes of making a fresh start. “We’re all neighbours here,” says Mats (Markus Scarth Tønseth...

You may not have spotted it – it was pretty quiet, nobody’s really been talking about it much – but there was a midterm election in the United States last week. And it was, not to put too fine a point on it, an absolute bloodbath. The Democrats swept the board, winning in places like Kansas which haven’t sent a non-Republican to the Senate in almost a century.

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Is it really a decade since the first season of The Crown? Just a few months after the Brexit vote, Netflix put out the series that showed British history to the rest of the world – or at least the royal experience of it. “Rich and non-reverent”, said the Guardian. “Luscious,” wrote the New York Times. 

By the time we reached the end of season six ...

At the start of autumn, clothes shopping in Wilmslow’s giant branch of Marks & Spencer, I twice found myself face-to-face with education secretary and Labour deputy leader Lucy Powell. She was wearing bright red lipstick, the neutral smile of the often recognised, a short leather jacket and a Joy Division t-shirt.

When I say “Joy Division t-shirt”, you probably ...

When my son Stanley was five, he became obsessed with the David Walliams book Ratburger. Subsequently, he demanded I buy each new Walliams book, begging me to read them to him, before he eventually was old enough to devour Mr Stink, Slime and The Beast of Buckingham Palace himself. 

Should I have encouraged him to read something b...