The comedian reflects on mortality and the new course his life has now taken in this warm account of his cancer diagnosis and treatment
There are enough cancer memoirs to fill a small bookshop, with bookcases for all the affected body parts. It can feel churlish to apply critical faculties to this of all subjects, but if there is a high bar for the genre, then it’s one Mark Steel clears like Dick Fosbury on a good day.
Sporting metaphors are a feature of The Leopard in My House, a new entry in the “throat” section by the comedian, broadcaster and campaigner. While waiting for a radiotherapy appointment in the basement of a London hospital, Steel meets Jules, an army general. As the treatment weakens them, they resolve to take the stairs rather than lift back up to ground level. “We’d describe the previous day’s climb as ‘set off at a good pace but only the first stage of the Tour de France. By the third week it was ‘two sets and a break down with a heavily bandaged ankle, but determined to finish the match’.”
The 48-year-old Ukrainian ambassador was on the radar of press cameras as Zelensky repeatedly looked her way over the course of the testy exchanges between the wartime leader and his US counterparts.
Vance snaked his way in first to the row between Trump and Zelenskyy, his second intrusion this month after Munich
JD Vance was supposed to be the inconsequential vice-president.
But his starring role in Friday’s blowup between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy – where he played a cross between Trump’s bulldog and tech bro Iago – may mark the moment that the postwar alliance between Europe and America finally collapsed.
She is the Sex Education star now stealing the show in Mike White’s hit series and about to appear in a gritty new Netflix drama. It’s all she ever wanted – but somehow, this ‘sad and shy’ actor finds folding the washing more rewarding than fame
Aimee Lou Wood has a peculiar habit of losing herself. She is known among her fellow cast members for capsizing so completely into a role that they can’t tell who they’re talking to: Wood or her character. (This probably wasn’t helped by the fact that her standout debut role in Sex Education was also called Aimee.) Suranne Jones, who plays alongside her in forthcoming dramedy Film Club, even bought her a bag with a big A on it: “And she said to me,” Wood says, “‘You can put things in there, and that’s Aimee’s bag, so you don’t lose who you are.’ My imagination and my reality can get scarily blurred.”
Wood has been searching for more clarity recently. “I’ve noticed more and more that I’m thinking: what do I actually want? Where can I be the driver and not the passenger?” I meet the 30-year-old in a kind of yoga-adjacent cafe in London. She’s got a Shelley Duvall thing going on, where you can’t tell whether her face – wide open eyes like a Disney fawn, tentative smile – is what makes her seem honest yet mysterious, or whether those qualities created her face. Either way, she looks both very film star, in leather blazer, Dr Martens and miniskirt, yet also not out of place in this hippyish restaurant.
Out of season, the island is more about natural charms than techno, but the sun still shines and the resident community keeps its unique spirit alive
Ibiza in the off-season. The big resort hotels are shuttered, the beach bars sealed up, the superclubs powered down until their showy reopening parties get the summer started again in late April. By July, the ratio will be back to 20 visitors to every one resident, but for now the island is as empty as it gets.
The sun is shining though, the air bright and warm, the sky a salted Balearic blue. And crowds still gather, here and there. At the Trotting Races, for example, in the Sant Rafael hippodrome in the centre of the island. A peculiar island tradition that supposedly began with charioteers during Ibiza’s Roman occupation, the sport requires jockeys to ride on little wheeled carts harnessed to horses that keep a briskish, semi-hurried pace, as if slightly late for an appointment. Kids and old boys seem to love it, the latter laying small bets on the races and dropping shots of brandy in their coffee. My horse, Maldiva des Puig, comes a distant third.
The Oz-set blockbuster, plus the Inside Out and Dune sequels, packed out cinemas but won’t win best picture at Sunday’s Academy Awards
Box-office success is a strong indicator of Oscars failure at this year’s Academy Awards, with the two highest-grossing best picture nominees among those titles least likely to win.
Wicked and Dune: Part Two have both made more than $700m globally, but neither is tipped – by anyone – to pick up the top prize on Sunday in Hollywood. Wicked, Jon M Chu’s first half of his adaptation of the Broadway musical, is currently on $728m, from an estimated $150m production budget.
From ammunition and culprit to ptarmigan and syllabus, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz
1 Which sleuth’s middle name was Death? 2 What game is played on a Riley Aristocrat? 3 Who declared, “You like me!” in her 1985 Oscar acceptance speech? 4 Lancashire Blues is which TV programme’s theme tune? 5 Which marine mammal can grow a tusk up to 10 feet long? 6 The Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda are the main sources for which mythology? 7 Which giants of science and politics were born on 12 February 1809? 8 Which football club’s badge is based on a Royal Mile mosaic? What links:
9 Genius; Magnificent; Impressive; Splendid; Great; Phew? 10 Cardiac; skeletal; smooth? 11 Albatross; Baltimore Bullet; Frog King; Iron Lady; Madame Butterfly; Thorpedo? 12 R38; Dixmude; R101; Akron; Hindenburg? 13 Donald III; Ethelred the Unready; Henry VI; Edward IV? 14 Adele Bloch-Bauer; Emilie Flöge; Hermine Gallia; Fritza Riedler? 15 Ammunition; culprit; ginkgo; Imogen; ptarmigan; syllabus?
Pete Rose at bat at Shea Stadium in 1985. Despite being one of the baseball’s most famed players, his gambling led to a lifetime ban and kept him out of the Hall of Fame.
Cam Thomas’ return to the court took two months — and too long. The Nets’ young guard finally made his comeback Friday night, after an absence that lasted 57 days but felt even longer. “Totally. I’ve never been out this much ever, so it’s definitely an adjustment,” Thomas said shortly before tipoff of Friday’s 121-102...
President Trump and Vice President JD Vance castigated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine for not being grateful enough for U.S. aid. “You’re gambling with World War III,” Trump told Zelensky.
Rubio, who was seated feet away from the 47-year-old Ukranian leader, faulted Zelensky's approach and accused him of antagonizing President Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
New Mexico town shocked by deaths of actor, wife and dog – but answers to critical questions may take time to emerge
As New Mexico authorities investigate the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, their adopted home town of Santa Fe is grappling with the mystery of what happened to the couple.
Hackman, a Hollywood legend with two Academy Awards picked up over a 60-year career, and Arakawa, a classical pianist, had lived in the area for decades and had embraced the close-knit community that is New Mexico’s capital city.
The former French PM says the US is no longer an ally of Europe – but has joined Russia and China as an ‘illiberal superpower’
Dominique de Villepin made his name with a memorable speech to the UN security council in February 2003, just before the US-led invasion of Iraq. De Villepin, the then French foreign minister, in effect signalled France’s intention to veto aUN resolution authorising the war, forcing the US and UK to act unilaterally. He warned that Washington’s strategy would lead to chaos in the Middle East and undermine international institutions. The prophetic plea was met with applause, a rare event in the security council chamber. It led to the career diplomat’s inclusion as a character in David Hare’s 2004 anti-war play, Stuff Happens.
Now the veteran statesman, who warned about the risks of Europe’s over-reliance on the US many years before it became a mainstream opinion in Paris or Berlin, is back with advice on how to respond to the most serious breakdown in Europe’s relationship with the US in 80 years.
Though scientist was not thought to be a great drinker, he may have used beer as an ingredient in the homemade ink in which he wrote his greatest work
Issac Newton has long been a familiar figure in museums around the world. Now, one of the famed scientist’s most prized possessions is due to go on display for the first time in 160 years: his beer mug.
The wooden mug will be on public display at the Royal Society, in central London, from 4 March, alongside items including Newton’s greatest work, the Principia, and the scientist’s death mask, which was prepared shortly after his death to serve as a likeness for sculptures.
The sound the toys make mimic the plaintive cries of wounded creatures, exposing our pooch’s uncontrollable sadism
My wife derives grim satisfaction from buying dog toys that advertise their indestructibility, and then watching as the dog destroys them, often within hours of their purchase.
“That came with a one-year guarantee,” she says, pointing to the fragments littering the rug.
If chefs were footballers, Nord’s Daniel Heffy would be in a league of his own
Nord, 100 Old Hall St, Liverpool L3 9QJ. Snacks £6.50-£11; small plates 315.50-£27, large plates £20-£36, desserts £11-£16, wines from £32
A midweek night and the restaurant is completely empty. Music thrums and staff drift about looking purposeful, despite being a little short on purpose until we show up. This has nothing to do with Nord and everything to do with football. At the exact time of our booking, Everton are kicking off against Liverpool, two miles away at Goodison Park, for what has been described to me as not just a game, but the game. As well as being a local derby, it’s also the last ever match to be played between the two at the stadium before Everton move to their new home at Bramley-Moore Dock. Even a blithering football ignoramus like me can recognise the significance of such a game to a city like Liverpool and why that might suppress bookings.
Yukari, 29, a freelance motion designer, meets John, 31, a furniture sales manager
What were you hoping for?
Dating in a big city can be such a slog, so I was really just hoping for a connection. It’s always exciting to be set up on a date in a different way.
Don’t discard the rendered fat from a roast – it has unbeatable crisping qualities, and makes this traditional British dried fruit cake sing
There was never any sourdough at the village bakery in Maiden Newton, Dorset; just traditional, no-frills British products such as white tin loaves, pasties, doughnuts, rock cakes and the most incredible lardy cake. Sadly, it’s closed now, but the memory of that lardy cake lives on.
Government targets party’s ‘softness on standing up to Putin’ to show Reform is out of step with UK public
Labour is setting out to increase its attacks on Nigel Farage’s Reform UK over its stance on Russia, as polling and focus groups show the public are firmly pro-Ukraine and against Vladimir Putin.
One cabinet source said Labour was planning to “take the fight” to Reform on the issues of the Ukraine war and the NHS after “waking up” to the party’s “softness on standing up to Putin”.
Olympic champion clears 6.27m at meet in Clermont-Ferrand
Swede releases first song Bop under nickname ‘Mondo’ on same day
Sweden’s Armand Duplantis soared 6.27 metres to shatter the world pole vault record for a staggering 11th time at the All Star Perche meet in Clermont-Ferrand, France after releasing his debut song earlier the same day.
The two-time Olympic and world champion cleared the record height on his first attempt on Friday to break his previous global mark of 6.26 set in Silesia in August, sparking track-side fireworks that lit up the arena.
Two children a week are killed in the West Bank. Two cameras recorded the circumstances of one such death
The last time Nassar al-Hammouni talked to his son, Ayman, it was by telephone and the 12-year-old was overflowing with plans for the coming weekend, and for the rest of his life. He had joined a local football team and planned to register at a karate club that weekend. When he grew up, he told Nassar, he was going to become a doctor, or better still an engineer to help his father in the construction job that took him away from their home in Hebron every week.
None of that – the football, the karate or his imagined future career – will happen now. Last Friday, two days after the call to his father, Ayman was killed, shot by Israeli fire, video footage seen by the Guardian suggests.
With the mothers of Elon’s kids begging for his attention on social media, he makes much of ‘pronatalism’ – but is that just a fancy word for bad parenting? ‘I don’t know whether I’d describe it as fun,’ says Aimee Lou Wood on the intensity of making The White Lotus. And are ordinary life experiences, bodily imperfections and normal differences being unnecessarily pathologised? Neurologist and author Suzanne O’Sullivan argues just that
A Washington-based Muslim nonprofit agreed this week to settle a case brought by a former board member and employee rather than open its books to reveal sources of foreign funding, The Post has learned.
It’s a cliche as regular as clockwork in the aftermath of an inexplicable tragedy: “That was the day we lost our innocence”. But do we really start from a place of innocence or are we always somehow complicit in acts of violence? Do perpetrators attack from without, or are they an expression of something abominable within the community, its monstrous id? These questions haunt the halls of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s extraordinary contemporary opera as surely as they’ll disturb the dreams of its audience.
Innocence opens with a deeply ominous series of chords from the lowest keys on the piano, as swirling strings and smirking bassoons mix with the trills and runs from the higher woodwinds, punctuated by the occasional crash of percussion. Atmospheric doesn’t begin to cover it. The music has shades of Bartók and Górecki, with more than a little of that master of dread, György Ligeti. The singers slink on as the curtain rises, explaining that they “can’t go to work any more”, that they “can’t have my back to the door”. Trauma animates every flinch; these people have clearly been exposed to unspeakable horror.
The EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said ‘the free world needs a new leader’ and that it was up to Europeans to take this challenge
The EU foreign policy chief has declared that “the free world needs a new leader”, as European leaders threw their support behind Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after the stunning White House confrontation between him and Donald Trump.
Leaders from across Europe expressed their solidarity with the Ukrainian leader after the fractious exchange with JD Vance, the US vice-president, and Trump, who claimed he was not “ready for peace” and accused him of “gambling with world war three”.
Shiori Ito’s searing indictment of Japan’s justice system in handling sexual assault cases is nominated for best documentary feature at Sunday’s Academy Awards.
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