Estorick Collection, London
The contemplative ‘typewritings’ of Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard steal the show in a fascinating two-part survey of 20th-century experimental poetry

The typewriter drawings of a British Benedictine monk in the swinging 60s are so startling they deserve a sheaf of exclamation marks (although he himself barely used them). Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924-92) was always sparing with the punctuation, and so modest of spirit that on his artworks his name invariably appears in lower case. Sometimes it is typed in a vertical configuration – dsh – running down the page like a tiny Japanese inscription. Which is apt, for all of dsh’s “typewritings” amount to a foreign language.

Which is to say that although his works are composed of the letters and punctuation marks of an old manual Olivetti, they are not meant to be read so much as viewed. And what you see, on the framed A4 pages he liked to use, can be almost entirely abstract. A shifting pattern of dots, whirling constellations of commas, a vibration of hyphens that is something like visual interference. There is a beautiful work in the Estorick Collection in which a dense field of oblique strokes is interrupted by a single line of brackets, running diagonally up the sheet, which might be read as a ripple in water or time.

A shocking Royal College of Nursing report reveals the toll chronic underfunding has taken on staff, and rings alarm bells for the future

I’ve never read a report quite like it. Last week the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) published accounts from the frontline of corridor care in NHS hospitals . There are next to no charts or statistics, no lists of recommendations or thematic analysis: just page after page – more than 400 – of testimony from nurses about patients being treated in appallingly undignified conditions in corridors, cupboards and storerooms across the NHS.

Astonishingly, there is no official data on how many patients are affected nationwide. So the RCN has filled the gap, sending out a member survey at the end of December and collating this report in a matter of days. It presents the raw, unvarnished truth about standards of care that once, in normal times, would have raised all kinds of official red flags. Today, they have become routine in every corner of the country, with some NHS trusts even advertising roles in corridor nursing .

Some analysts fear ballooning federal debt and a bullish stock market means ‘something will surely snap’

Donald Trump’s return to the White House on Monday has the world economy on tenterhooks. Could the 47th US president govern broadly as he did last time, when his most extreme threats were ultimately softened? Or is this time different?

Corporate America’s biggest beasts have cosied up to the president-elect, but there are also serious jitters on Wall Street, amid investor fears that Trump’s most colourful campaign rhetoric will soon become a reality: risking a fresh inflation shock in the world’s largest economy.

Collection of seven shorts due out in 2025 tells story of conflict from perspective of animals

The occupying Russian soldiers paid little attention to the elderly woman shuffling through the farmland surrounding the villages outside Kyiv, taking her goat to pasture. But she was focused closely on them. After locating their positions, she headed back home with the goat, and later called her grandson, a soldier in the Ukrainian army, to give the coordinates.

The story is one of seven episodes, based on real events from the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion but lightly fictionalised, that make up a feature film about the war in Ukraine, due out later this year. All seven of the shorts have one thing in common: they tell the story of the conflict from the perspective of animals.

Russian-born UK citizen and Tory party activist Sergei Cristo fought to make MI5 sit up and take notice of the Russian political interference operation now threatening democracy in Britain – and around the world

In the dark days of the spring in 2022, as Russian troops terrorised Bucha and every day brought shocking new scenes of Ukrainians fleeing for their lives, I rang an old acquaintance, Sergei Cristo. Cristo is a Russian-born British citizen and I prepared for what I suspected might be a long conversation: he is a talker. He was born in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, but he moved to Britain when he was 19 and it’s fair to say we’re not the most obvious of allies. He loves the royal family and is a passionate Conservative party activist. He used to be on the committee of a donor club for young Conservatives, “and then I became vice-chairman, I knew the cabinet, I knew the leader, everybody”.

He’s not kidding. He has photos of himself with everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Boris Johnson, and his favourite place to hang out used to be the Carlton Club, the grand Conservative private members’ club in central London.

As hair-loss treatments improve, one wonders if we’ll start to get nostalgic for a good combover

It is with mixed emotions that I announce the end of baldness. Rest in pates, old friend. This year will see the very last generation of men who, having arrived at the threshold of their 30s, are forced to accept the loss of their hair, with all their future sons and grandsons nipping instead to Turkey for a little implant and some kofta. Gone today, hair tomorrow.

It’s true, look around. Compared with the Sean Connerys and Bruce Willises of yore, the number of bald celebrities on screen today can be counted on a single fist. The surgical technology has evolved, the transplants have become more accessible, the preventative drugs have improved, the death of bald is nigh. Like combovers, the hair plugs bring their own acts of faith of course, with hairlines so straight and thick it appears sometimes as if they are creeping down the face at night like a mask – every time I see one on telly I’m reminded of the Simpsons episode where Homer gets an evil hair transplant that plants its roots in his brain, leading him to murder Apu and Moe.

Relatives of those who committed suicide claim betting industry is not being held to account, report reveals

Families of gambling addicts who took their own lives have told of being let down by the coroner service, which they say failed to properly investigate the role of betting firms, a new report has revealed.

Campaign groups believe that gambling is a factor in hundreds of suicides each year, but in only one inquest has a gambling company been named as an “interested person”.

Don’t rush to mourn the end of a liberal international order that too often put order before liberalism

The historian Steven Shapin opened his account of The Scientific Revolution with the line: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” It is tempting to say much the same about the “liberal international order” (LIO), that “there is no such thing as the liberal international order and there are hundreds of books about it”. And this column, too.

There was a Scientific Revolution. And there has been since the Second World War a global framework that has helped order international relations. But whether that framework can be described as “liberal” or embodies what champions of the LIO claim it does – “an open world connected by the free flow of people, goods, ideas and capital” that was, in the words of Antony Blinken , the outgoing US secretary of state, “America’s greatest contribution to peace and progress” – is questionable.