The smash-hit period drama gets the Hollywood treatment as Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby strides into 1940’s wartime Birmingham, while Hugh Jackman and Zen McGrath try to repair their fractured relationship

Whether the Birmingham-set period crime drama needed another outing after six series is a moot point, but Tommy Shelby is back to brood magnificently one final time. Creator Steven Knight and director Tom Harper keep things reassuringly familiar (glowering vistas, anachronistic songs, random acts of violence) but we’re now in 1940, and the Nazis are coming. While Tommy (Cillian Murphy) is holed up in a decaying mansion haunted by the ghosts of his past, his impetuous son and heir Duke (Barry Keoghan) forms an alliance with British fascist John Beckett (a cool Tim Roth) to flood the country with counterfeit currency. And only Tommy can stop them …
Friday 20 March, Netflix

The smash-hit period drama gets the Hollywood treatment as Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby strides into 1940’s wartime Birmingham, while Hugh Jackman and Zen McGrath try to repair their fractured relationship

Whether the Birmingham-set period crime drama needed another outing after six series is a moot point, but Tommy Shelby is back to brood magnificently one final time. Creator Steven Knight and director Tom Harper keep things reassuringly familiar (glowering vistas, anachronistic songs, random acts of violence) but we’re now in 1940, and the Nazis are coming. While Tommy (Cillian Murphy) is holed up in a decaying mansion haunted by the ghosts of his past, his impetuous son and heir Duke (Barry Keoghan) forms an alliance with British fascist John Beckett (a cool Tim Roth) to flood the country with counterfeit currency. And only Tommy can stop them …
Friday 20 March, Netflix

The smash-hit period drama gets the Hollywood treatment as Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby strides into 1940’s wartime Birmingham, while Hugh Jackman and Zen McGrath try to repair their fractured relationship

Whether the Birmingham-set period crime drama needed another outing after six series is a moot point, but Tommy Shelby is back to brood magnificently one final time. Creator Steven Knight and director Tom Harper keep things reassuringly familiar (glowering vistas, anachronistic songs, random acts of violence) but we’re now in 1940, and the Nazis are coming. While Tommy (Cillian Murphy) is holed up in a decaying mansion haunted by the ghosts of his past, his impetuous son and heir Duke (Barry Keoghan) forms an alliance with British fascist John Beckett (a cool Tim Roth) to flood the country with counterfeit currency. And only Tommy can stop them …
Friday 20 March, Netflix

More than 20% of weekend availability lost in England since 2022, forcing some to turn to A&E, says national association

People who need to obtain medication at the weekend are having to undertake long trips because more pharmacies are cutting their opening hours on Saturdays and Sundays.

One in six pharmacies in England have reduced their hours at weekends since 2022, with some shutting altogether, as a result of “unsustainable” pressures on their budgets.

This prose work from the Nobel literature winner opens up her novels and offers beautiful imagery

When Korean novelist Han Kang won the Nobel prize in literature in 2024, the committee praised her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. In other words, Han’s work looks both out at the world – towards the 1980 Gwangju massacre fictionalised in her novel Human Acts –  and inward to the human experience, as with The Vegetarian’s portrait of one woman’s claustrophobic struggle.

Much of the appeal of Han’s work is in its mystery, the gaps she leaves for the reader to close. So it is tantalising to have this collection of prose, “a book of reflections” that might illuminate the darker corners of her work.

(Knekelhuis)
Music boxes, miaows and strange melodies pepper the whimsical and charmingly lo-fi post-punk of Laurène Exposito and Théo Delaunay

The lyrics for Diagonale des Yeux’s debut album were written in the style of an exquisite corpse game, with members Laurène Exposito and Théo Delaunay taking it in turns to patch together ephemeral thoughts and themes in a mix of French, German, English and Spanish. The bizarre, multilingual stories that emerged match the French duo’s ramshackle, home-recorded sound, which features everything from toybox percussion to farmyard sound effects.

Their whimsical approach is anchored in the outsider pop and post-punk of 1980s Europe, which embraced discordant instrumentation and disaffected vocals. These 12 tracks are charmingly lo-fi, built around rudimentary synth and guitar melodies that often careen into strange directions. Acolytes jumps from frenetic punk jam into swooning breakdown and back again within just 90 seconds; Le Rayon Orchidée stumbles groggily to a halt like a malfunctioning music box. Both sing, adding to the theatrics: playing around with effects, they range from pitch-shifted, kitten-like miaows to macho groans.

(Knekelhuis)
Music boxes, miaows and strange melodies pepper the whimsical and charmingly lo-fi post-punk of Laurène Exposito and Théo Delaunay

The lyrics for Diagonale des Yeux’s debut album were written in the style of an exquisite corpse game, with members Laurène Exposito and Théo Delaunay taking it in turns to patch together ephemeral thoughts and themes in a mix of French, German, English and Spanish. The bizarre, multilingual stories that emerged match the French duo’s ramshackle, home-recorded sound, which features everything from toybox percussion to farmyard sound effects.

Their whimsical approach is anchored in the outsider pop and post-punk of 1980s Europe, which embraced discordant instrumentation and disaffected vocals. These 12 tracks are charmingly lo-fi, built around rudimentary synth and guitar melodies that often careen into strange directions. Acolytes jumps from frenetic punk jam into swooning breakdown and back again within just 90 seconds; Le Rayon Orchidée stumbles groggily to a halt like a malfunctioning music box. Both sing, adding to the theatrics: playing around with effects, they range from pitch-shifted, kitten-like miaows to macho groans.

This prose work from the Nobel literature winner opens up her novels and offers beautiful imagery

When Korean novelist Han Kang won the Nobel prize in literature in 2024, the committee praised her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. In other words, Han’s work looks both out at the world – towards the 1980 Gwangju massacre fictionalised in her novel Human Acts –  and inward to the human experience, as with The Vegetarian’s portrait of one woman’s claustrophobic struggle.

Much of the appeal of Han’s work is in its mystery, the gaps she leaves for the reader to close. So it is tantalising to have this collection of prose, “a book of reflections” that might illuminate the darker corners of her work.

More than 20% of weekend availability lost in England since 2022, forcing some to turn to A&E, says national association

People who need to obtain medication at the weekend are having to undertake long trips because more pharmacies are cutting their opening hours on Saturdays and Sundays.

One in six pharmacies in England have reduced their hours at weekends since 2022, with some shutting altogether, as a result of “unsustainable” pressures on their budgets.