As she brings A Shadow Work to the UK, the New York choreographer talks about therapy, ‘pulling up women with me’ and art-led activism

Chanel DaSilva has always been a dancer. “I felt completely free,” she says of her first class. “I felt at home. Like I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. And it’s weird to know that at the age of three.” The New Yorker, 38, is a rising star choreographer in the US, with credits including Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, and is about to make her international debut in London.

DaSilva’s dance style has been described as “technique meets humanity”, in the sense that she draws on the precision and virtuosity of classical and modern dance, but brings in a freedom and naturalism. The piece she has made here for the company Ballet Black, called A Shadow Work, is in part about dealing with grief over the death of her mother when DaSilva was 19. At the time, trying to get through her college education, she couldn’t cope with it. “So I packed up that grief, put it in a little box, and pushed it down deep. And it stayed there for about 10 years until I was finally brave enough to reckon with it.” In hindsight, “I should have mourned,” she says. “But we’re not judging.”

Ballet Black: Shadows is at Hackney Empire, London, 13-15 March. Then touring

• France coach Galthié furious over loss of pivotal captain
• Prop says he had ‘no malicious intent’ in incident at ruck

The Ireland prop Andrew Porter insisted “I haven’t done anything wrong” as he hit back at France’s head coach Fabien Galthié amid the fallout over Antoine Dupont’s season-ending knee injury.

Les Bleus’ captain – widely regarded as the world’s best player – faces a lengthy spell on the sidelines after rupturing an anterior cruciate ligament during his country’s 42-27 Six Nations win in Dublin. France were furious with the incident which caused the injury, with Galthié branding it “reprehensible” as he announced his intention to refer Porter and his Ireland teammate Tadhg Beirne to the citing commissioner for possible retrospective punishment.

Secretary of education Linda McMahon says move is part of president’s mission to dismantle department

US Senate Democrats were wrestling on Wednesday with how to respond to a stopgap funding bill passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, choosing between voting for a bill many of them oppose or allowing a government shutdown, reports Reuters.

President Donald Trump’s Republicans hold a 53-47 Senate majority, but would need the support of at least some Democrats to meet the chamber’s 60-vote threshold to pass most legislation. It could vote on the measure as soon as Wednesday, depending on Democrats’ plans, a source familiar with the Senate Republican discussions said.

Captain of Solong, which was in collision with tanker, was arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter

The arrested captain of the Solong, a container ship that crashed into another vessel in the North Sea, is a Russian national, its management company has confirmed.

The 59-year-old was arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter on Tuesday after Monday’s fiery collision about 12 miles off the East Yorkshire coast, which left one man presumed dead.

A bullet grazed the Memphis man’s thigh after his one-year-old pit bull got his paw stuck in a gun’s trigger guard

Dog bites man is hardly news, but in Tennessee, a dog recently shot a man.

In what is only the latest instance of a kind of accidental shooting that intermittently occurs in the US, Jerald Kirkwood reported to police in Memphis that he and a woman were lying in bed with a firearm when his dog jumped up and inadvertently caused the weapon to discharge.

Mangroves are being destroyed and residents displaced to make way for an airport to serve president Nayib Bukele’s vision of a tax-free economic hub

When Nayib Bukele launched his presidential campaign in the eastern department of La Unión in 2018, the new outsider politician stood in a street packed with supporters and promised a new airport. La Unión and the rest of El Salvador’s eastern region have historically been neglected by governments, with few infrastructure projects and widespread poverty.

Just a month later, Bukele travelled to Germany to lobby for his project. “Munich airport is interested in operating our new airport that we will build in La Unión,” he said.

The defiantly anti-commercial British musician had walked away from mainstream success twice by his early 20s. Will his Academy Award convince him to embrace Hollywood, celebrity, the big bucks?

Daniel Blumberg hands me his Oscar, as surprised as he is chuffed. Bloody hell, it’s heavy. Is it real gold? “I wish it was,” says the latest winner of best original score, for The Brutalist. (Apparently, it’s gold-plated bronze.) He puts it back on a shabby wooden shelf alongside his Bafta, also for The Brutalist, and his Ivor Novello award, which he won in 2022 for The World to Come, directed by Mona Fastvold (the partner of Brutalist director Brady Corbet). “Before the Ivor Novello, the only thing I’d ever won was ‘most improved footballer’ when I was six,” he says. “Honestly, I’d never thought about Oscars in my entire life. I’d never even watched the ceremony.”

Blumberg, 35, is the least likely Oscar winner you could imagine. Not because he lacks the talent, but because he has spent his career walking away from mainstream success. The former schoolboy indie pop star has reinvented himself as an atonal improviser of scratchy, screechy weirdness. If that sounds like a tough listen, it’s all combined with sublime minimalist melodies to create music as beautiful as it is challenging.

By turning his back on US allies and global institutions, Trump will help Xi Jinping advance his plan for a China-centric world

Is Donald Trump China’s worst nightmare or a dream come true? He is both, but not in equal measure. In the near-term, his tariff-led approach to trade will cause problems for Beijing. However, in just a few weeks he has done more damage to the liberal international order, the cohesion of the democratic west, and the US’s global standing, than all the combined efforts to undermine them in the entirety of the cold war. This goes beyond the wildest dreams China’s leaders could have had.

The tariffs already levied are serious enough, and Beijing cannot but see them as a harbinger of more to come. Unlike during his first term, this time Trump seems prepared to deliver the threats he makes. With China’s economy already misfiring, an intensified trade war is the last thing Beijing needs, despite the bravado of its diplomats.

Steve Tsang is director of the China Institute at Soas University of London and co-author of The Political Thought of Xi Jinping

The depiction of the Unknown Maroon – the Nèg Mawon – was commissioned by a dictator to represent freedom and now stands in the middle of a war zone

The Unknown Maroon faces west towards a wasteland of bullet-pocked buildings and desolate, litter-strewn streets.

To the statue’s left, armored cash transit vans race down Barracks Street towards Port-au-Prince’s waterfront as the sound of gunfire rings out.

US aid deliveries arriving through Polish logistics hub back to previous levels after US-Ukraine talks towards peace

• Ukraine agrees to 30-day ceasefire

French European Affairs minister, Benjamin Haddad, said the European Union could go further in its response to US tariffs, though a trade war was in no-one’s interest, Reuters reported.

“We have the means to go further, if we want,” Haddad told TF1 TV.

Swedish firm unable to ‘secure the necessary financial conditions to continue in its current form’

Northvolt, the Swedish electric vehicle battery startup, has filed for bankruptcy in Sweden, marking the end of a company once seen as Europe’s best hope of challenging the dominant Asian battery industry.

The company said in a statement it had been unable to “secure the necessary financial conditions to continue in its current form” in Sweden.

Broad shoulders and slim skirts reflected designer Anthony Vaccarello’s intention to create a ‘simplicity of silhouette’

Saint Laurent has cross-generational cool. On the last night of Paris fashion week, Kate Moss sat next to Catherine Deneuve, both in black tailoring, sheer blouses and high heels. Pedro Almodóvar and Rossy de Palma smiled for the cameras, while Hailey Bieber and Charli XCX kept their shades on.

Saint Laurent’s daytime silhouette this season is an inverted triangle, with broad shoulders narrowing to slim skirts and sheer tights. For evening, it flipped upside down, with slinky sweaters and grand ball skirts. The colours were of cocktail ring gemstones: emerald, sapphire, ruby and garnet.

For many Israelis, military service is a rite of passage that lasts two to three years. Being such a formative part of the social contract in Israel, it is unusual for eligible young people to refuse their draft orders. Every year some ask for exemptions, but only a handful openly declare themselves as conscientious objectors, commonly known as refuseniks. However, since 7 October and the war in Gaza, refusenik organisations say the number of people refusing the draft has risen, even though during wartime punishments are harsher. The Guardian’s Middle East correspondent, Bethan McKernan, spent time with Itamar Greenberg, an 18-year-old who has been in and out of military prison for almost a year as a result of his refusal to serve

Author of Detransition, Baby found success and pushback she never anticipated and now returns with a provocative collection of stories

Author Torrey Peters’ mind has imagined everything from a future virus that turns everyone trans to a crossdressing fetishist in a poreless silicone suit, but the premise of her new novel, Stag Dance, sounded too bizarre even for her. “If I hadn’t read it in a book I wouldn’t have believed it,” she told me during a lengthy conversation about her life and work. “It’s so over the top. It’s literally an upside down triangle. That’s a little too on the nose.”

The triangle Peters refers to is one that is made out of fabric, and that loggers in the early part of the last century used to affix to their crotches in order to denote that they had changed their sex to female for the purposes of dances held deep in the wilderness. This is a fact that Peters uncovered while reading original texts about logging culture while developing the unique lexicon that she employs to write the titular novel. One of these “stag dances” forms the basis of Peters’ story, a remarkable feat of high modernism that channels the ethos of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian into the story of a lumberjack experiencing a remarkable gender transition.

The tournament will be leveraged for the glorification of a leader to a degree not seen since Benito Mussolini dominated the 1934 World Cup in Italy

Two men held a press event in the Oval Office last week to announce a taskforce that would work to resolve the logistical problems surrounding the 2026 World Cup in North America, which were largely created by one of them.

Both men were in their element. One, Donald Trump, received toady genuflection and a large, golden … thing (actually the Club World Cup trophy). The other, Fifa president Gianni Infantino, occasioned to bask in the proximity to real power, was affectionately referred to as “The king of soccer, I guess, in a certain way” by Trump.

Injecting pollutants into the atmosphere to reflect the sun would be extremely dangerous, but the UK is funding field trials

Some years ago in the pages of the Guardian, we sounded the alarm about the increasing attention being paid to solar geoengineering – a barking mad scheme to cancel global heating by putting pollutants in the atmosphere that dim the sun by reflecting some sunlight back to space.

In one widely touted proposition, fleets of aircraft would continually inject sulphur compounds into the upper atmosphere, simulating the effects of a massive array of volcanoes erupting continuously. In essence, we have broken the climate by releasing gigatonnes of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide, and solar geoengineering proposes to “fix” it by breaking a very different part of the climate system.

Raymond T Pierrehumbert FRS is professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford. He is an author of the 2015 US National Academy of Sciences report on climate intervention

Michael E Mann ForMemRS is presidential distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis

Geoffrey Rush’s retired judge is terrorised by Lithgow’s therapy puppet-wielding fellow resident in this claustrophobic tale of elder-on-elder abuse

Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall set in a care home, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end. It’s a movie about bullying and elder abuse – more specifically, elder-on-elder abuse – and it is always most chilling when it sticks to the realist constraints of what could actually happen.

The locale is an un-luxurious residential care facility where a retired judge is now astonished to find himself; this is Stefan Mortensen, played by Geoffrey Rush, who succumbed to a catastrophic stroke while passing judgment from the bench. He is a cantankerous and high-handed man, furious to be in this demeaning place and who, like many there, assures himself it isn’t for long. Mortensen has to share a room with Tony Garfield (George Henare), a retired rugby star whose career fizzled out. These men are terrorised by long-term patient Dave Crealy, played with true hideousness by John Lithgow, a racist bully who convinces the care staff he is a gentle, harmless soul by exaggerating his mental and physical decay, but tyrannises patients behind officialdom’s back with his therapy hand puppet named Jenny Pen, making the bewildered and terrified patients submit to her “rule”.

• Berrada hopes investment in team will not be affected
• Plan to build £2bn stadium in five years has this in mind

Omar Berrada has admitted it is a “risk” for Manchester United to try to build a world-class team and venue at the same time. The club announced on Tuesday they planned to construct a 100,000-seat ground on land adjacent to Old Trafford.

Berrada hopes United can move into the £2bn stadium by the start of the 2030-31 season but said the cost of building it could have an impact, acknowledging that Arsenal and Tottenham struggled to juggle building a ground and fighting at the top.

The third season of Mike White’s delicious resort-set comedy drama has teased yet another murder but we don’t yet know the whos or the whys

After a characteristically slow start, we are now halfway through this year’s season of The White Lotus. From what we know of the last two seasons, this means that things are about to get very crazy very quickly. To use season one as a way marker, we are now approximately the runtime of The Brutalist away from watching someone perform the equivalent of a suitcase poop.

More than previous runs, however, a number of mysteries still hang over almost every White Lotus character this year. We know that there’s a shooting. We know that there’s a body. At this point, almost every character could be either one of them. It’s time to theorise wildly.

Mining companies are poised to mine the deep sea – but opposition is growing. What is the environmental cost, and are these metals actually needed?

Nintendo Switch, iPhone/iPad, Mac, PC (version played); Inkle
Inkle’s latest game revels in lying, stealing and blackmail as you resort to any means necessary to avoid expulsion from a posh school

As with seemingly everything in the UK, it all comes back to the class system. Verity Amersham, a scholarship student at Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Girls, is accused of pushing the hockey captain out of a window, and the school’s fearsome headmistress is determined to expel her despite the flimsiest evidence. When Verity protests her innocence, Miss Mulligatawney remains unpersuaded, spelling out her reasoning in plain terms: as a northerner with working-class parents, Verity simply isn’t the “right sort”.

The injustice of it all is a potent driver, ensuring I set about my goal of preventing Verity’s expulsion with determined zeal, much like Matilda defying the hateful Miss Trunchbull. As in developer Inkle’s 2021 game Overboard!, you’re given a time limit to work within and a handful of areas to move between, from the library to the sick room (AKA the “san”, where the school’s grumpy matron lurks). Each area has characters to talk to and objects to find, and each action moves the clock forward. The game follows a rigid school timetable: at 2pm, for example, all of the students will troop up to the library for Latin.

Expelled! is out on 12 March

Leaving home at 16 to pursue his dream has paid off for Britain’s youngest F1 driver as he begins his first full season

There is an unmistakeable air of steely determination about Ollie Bearman; an almost disquieting sense of purpose doubtless instrumental in propelling the 19-year-old British driver into Formula One with an eye-catching opening to his career.

Bearman is about to enter his first full season with the Haas team and while tearing most teenagers away from their friends is a torturous task, since he left home in Essex at 16 to pursue the dream of reaching F1, everything has been subsumed to the cause.

Plus: high-scoring Premier League games with no English-born scorer and club crests similar to logos

• Mail us with your questions and answers

“Liverpool’s 1-0 win against Paris Saint-Germain last week was the ultimate smash-and-grab victory. When was the phrase first used in a football context?” poses our very own Niall McVeigh.

Liverpool’s win in Paris was smash-and-grab bingo. They were away from home, like all burglars. They were battered and their keeper had the game of his life, which made it feel like they had stolen a result they didn’t deserve. The match was low-scoring, which meant there was a single, sudden moment of smashing and grabbing. And that moment came late on, in the 87th minute, increasing the dramatic impact to Hitchcockian levels.

SMASH AND GRAB

Audacious thief sentenced

Sentence of 20 months’ hard labour at Clerkenwell today on William Woolley (31), labourer, for breaking the window of one of Messrs Straker’s establishments in the East End.

Prisoner’s practice, it was shown, was to deliberately smash shop windows with a stone, and then bolt with whatever he could grab from the window.

European Commission says it will impose counter-tariffs on US goods from April while UK takes ‘pragmatic’ approach; US tariffs cover household goods such as tin foil

• Full story: Trump tariffs on steel and aluminium come into effect amid US-Canada trade war
• EU retaliates against Trump tariffs with €26bn ‘countermeasures’

Community Union, Britain’s steelworkers’ union says the tariffs are “hugely damaging” and threaten jobs – and “self-defeating” for the United States.

Alasdair McDiarmid, Community’s assistant general secretary, said:

These US tariffs on UK steel exports are hugely damaging and they threaten jobs. For the US it’s also self-defeating, as the UK is a leading supplier of specialist steel products required by their defence and aerospace sectors.

The UK’s response must include delivering a robust Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the strongest possible trade defence measures to shield our sector from diverted imports.

Our government must act decisively to protect the steel industry and its workers following the announcement of US tariffs.

This is a matter of national security. Steel should be immediately designated as critical national infrastructure to properly protect it.

A doctor’s brilliant study of the dangers of overdiagnosis, from ADHD to long Covid

We swim in oceans of quackery. The media is flooded with misinformation about health and pseudo-diagnoses based on vibes rather than evidence. Books awash with error and supposition swamp our charts, penned by people uniquely unqualified to write them. Our ears are filled with popular podcasts claiming health benefits but really just peddling unregulated dietary supplements. And Robert Kennedy Jr, a man who has spent a lifetime spewing antivaccine jibber-jabber, is now US secretary of health. Vaccination is arguably the most successful health intervention in history (with the possible exception of sanitation), and now more than ever we should be basking in the fact that a global pandemic was brought to a close by safe and effective vaccines.

But here’s the conundrum: medical diagnoses are on the rise across the board, in many cases dramatically, and this is fuel for the medical disinformation industry. The most obvious example is autism, the incidence of which has shot up in a couple of decades, correlated with, but not caused by, an increase in vaccination. Cancer diagnoses are also up. A lot more people seem to have ADHD these days, which was barely around when I was at school. And millions now endure long Covid, a disease with a bucket of symptoms that did not exist at all five years ago.

Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s community in rural Maine is not always welcoming to trans women. She deals with the hostility by capturing the local area’s beauty

Kerala is providing lessons on how not to be scammed by employment agencies as US and UK step up immigration raids

On a warm February morning, Devika, 24, sits with more than 60 classmates in the city of Kochi, in Kerala, southern India, learning how to tell a bogus overseas recruitment agency from a genuine one. Organised by the local government, the training session on safe and legal migration is among a handful of interventions in a country making headlines around the world as undocumented Indian migrants are rounded up and sent back home.

The training could not have been more timely.

The company’s latest Loud & Clear report – a relatively transparent look into a closed-off industry – shows just how skewed financial success is in music

Since 2021, Spotify has published its Loud & Clear report, corralling data points to show how much money is being earned by artists on the streaming service. There is much talk of “transparency” – perhaps the most duplicitous word in the music industry’s lexicon – but this year’s report feels very different, coming as it does alongside the publication of author Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine, a studs-up assault on streaming economics in general and Spotify in particular.

Then there is the unfortunate timing of the news, as recently unearthed by Music Business Worldwide, that Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek has cashed out close to $700m in shares in the company since 2023 while Martin Lorentzon, the company’s other co-founder, cashed out $556.8m in shares in 2024 alone. Meanwhile artists scream of widening financial inequalities and accuse streaming services of doing better from artists than artists are doing from streaming services.

As a new exhibition celebrating the portraits of Edvard Munch opens at London’s National Portrait Gallery, we take a trip to the artist’s home city in Norway

I reach Ekeberg Park at sunset and walk along the muddy paths to find the viewpoint. The late winter sky is like a watercolour: soft blue and grey clouds layer together, with a sweeping gradient of yellow verging from tobacco stain to pale lemon above the distant, bruise-coloured hills. At the viewpoint, I look out over Oslo and listen for a scream.

In 1892, Edvard Munch took a walk in this same park as the sun was setting. Recording the experience in his diary, he wrote that he heard “a great and infinite scream through nature”. The experience became the basis of his most enduring painting.

Eating with my family was a source of joy and pleasure until illness ravaged my digestive system. After my stoma was fitted, everything tasted amazing again

Growing up, I always loved food. On Sundays, I’d ask for seconds of my roast dinner. My gran would bake cakes every weekend, which I would drown in custard. I can still remember how the chocolate digestive biscuits I’d eat when I got in from school tasted, how satisfying it was to dip them in my tea as I chatted with my dad about my day. Food brought us together as a family and it was something I always relished.

Then I got sick. I was 12 when I first displayed symptoms of Crohn’s disease. I started getting unbearable pain in my stomach and going to the toilet a bit more. Then a lot more. And I stopped feeling hungry. My weight dropped three stone (19kg), my periods stopped and I had no energy, but it was my sudden lack of appetite that I missed the most. Food had always been a source of joy; I’d watch cookery shows and cry, remembering how much pleasure I used to take from eating. Now, my body rejected everything except supplement drinks that pretended to have flavours like lime and orange but always just tasted like bile. I was fading away and it was terrifying.

Centre-right party wins most votes ahead of the Naleraq party, with coalition talks expected to begin

Greenland has voted for a complete overhaul of its government in a shock result in which the centre-right Democrat party more than tripled its seats after a dramatic election campaign fought against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s threats to acquire the Arctic island.

Tuesday’s election, in which the Democrats replaced Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA), the party of the former prime minister Múte B Egede, as the biggest party in the Inatsisartut, the Greenlandic parliament, also led to a doubling of seats for Naleraq – the party most open to US collaboration and which supports a snap vote on independence – making it the second-biggest party.

The EU has its Trojan horses and Nato’s cornerstone has crumbled. But European allies, including the UK, are bound by an urgent shared purpose

Moscow’s immense military mobilisation is clearly not aimed just at Ukraine. Unless Vladimir Putin accepts a ceasefire with meaningful security guarantees there will be no end in sight to the war. If anything, we could see the extension of Russia’s aggression beyond Ukraine. The bleak reality is that Europe still faces an unprecedented threat and notwithstanding signs of progress for Ukraine at talks in Jeddah, we face it alone.

Worse, we now have to confront it with the US working against us. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump appear to share a plan: a Vichy-like regime in Ukraine and a European continent split into spheres of influence, which Russia, the US (and perhaps China) can colonise and prey upon. Most European publics sense this. A critical mass of European leaders gets it too. They are beginning to act.

Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist

US betrayal of Ukraine is the rehearsal for a grander bargain with Moscow and an assault on continental solidarity

A prime time current affairs programme; a discussion about Donald Trump’s handling of the war in Ukraine. “He’s doing excellent things,” says a firebrand politician on the panel, before listing White House actions that have belittled Volodymyr Zelenskyy and weakened his battlefield position – military aid suspended; satellite communications obstructed; intelligence withheld. “Do we support this?” It is a rhetorical question.

“We support it all. Absolutely,” the celebrity host responds. “We are thrilled by everything Trump is doing.”

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

First such study finds laws on abortion, debt and dress help increase rate of women being jailed twice as fast as for men

Poverty, abuse and discriminatory laws are driving a huge rise in the number of women in prison globally, according to a new report.

With the rise of the far right and an international backlash against women’s rights, the research said there was a risk that laws would increasingly be used to target women, forcing more behind bars.

• Ukrainian upsets local hope Jessica Pegula 5-7 6-1 6-2
• Will play Russia’s Mirra Andreeva in quarter-finals

Elina Svitolina said she had received an outpouring of support from Americans after the US President Donald Trump’s extraordinary clash with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House last month.

Svitolina thanked Americans for their “unwavering support” and “compassion” in a social media post on Sunday after beating Danielle Collins in the third round of Indian Wells.

Cladribine tablet for those with active multiple sclerosis will reduce hospital visits and free up appointments

Thousands of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) in England are to become the first in Europe to benefit from a major roll out of an immunotherapy pill.

Current treatments involve regular trips to hospital, drug infusions, frequent injections and extensive monitoring, which add to the burden on patients and healthcare systems.

Young women wear their jeans low and ultra-baggy, while laughing at the ‘moms’ with their high waists and exposed ankles. It’s time to bring the generations together – if only to try on each other’s trousers

Every day, it feels as if social media finds new ways to let us know how old we are. Just joined TikTok? You’re probably a millennial. Wear your hair in a centre parting? Must be gen Z. Paid off your mortgage – or even have one? OK boomer.

This generational divide is particularly strong, it seems, when it comes to jeans. Look around you and you have probably noticed that younger people prefer to wear them low-rise, long-hemmed and ultra-baggy, while millennials wear them high on the waist and high off the ground – AKA the “mom jean”. TikTok is full of videos of young people mocking their elders for their jeans choices. Now even millennials are coming after their generation’s commitment to the style. “My fellow millennials,” begins a video from TikToker Indigo Tshai Williams-Brunton, “Just completely stop with the mom jeans.”

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2018: The foreign policy establishment has been lamenting its death for half a century. But Atlanticism has long been a convenient myth

By Madeleine Schwartz. Read by Kelly Burke

Standing room only in pubs and bars long before the action begins, thousands of British tourists now enjoy the festival in the Spanish hotspot

A bell rings for half past happy hour on Cheltenham festival eve in a city that has discarded time.

Not entirely, of course. Conventional clocks are required to determine the midday cut off between a cheap full English breakfast – available in a range of sizes, from large through to extra, extra large – and an ever so slightly pricier one. So, too, to distinguish between upcoming performances from Michael Jackson, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Queen, who, extraordinarily, have descended on the same Spanish bar, on the same night. Just as they will again tomorrow; at least, tribute acts of varying quality.

They played Red Square, launched MTV Russia and got driven home from a gay club by the police. But the freedoms witnessed by Pet Shop Boys have been crushed. Singer Neil Tennant relives those heady days – and calls for a revolution

The journalist Andrey Sapozhnikov of Novaya Gazeta Europe, the independent Russian newspaper that now operates from Latvia in order to avoid censorship by Putin’s regime, recently asked Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys: “You have been actively commenting on Russian politics since 2013 and the Pussy Riot case, and you are arguably one of the most engaged western artists in relation to the Russian context today. Why do you care so deeply about what is happening specifically in Russia?” Here is his reply, which the Guardian is publishing in English.

I have been interested in Russia since reading a book when I was a young boy about the 1917 revolutions. It fascinated me that the Russian empire was replaced by another empire, the Soviet Union, which unleashed a lot of energy but rapidly became a brutal dictatorship under Stalin, a 20th-century Ivan the Terrible. Since then I have read a lot about Soviet culture, particularly the work and struggles of Shostakovich and Prokofiev and other artists, writers, musicians. This interest fed into the lyrics I wrote. For instance My October Symphony, or indeed our first hit single, West End Girls: “In every city, in every nation / From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station.”