How to enjoy operaOperaTop 50 operasThese operas span four centuries and give a flavour of repertoire’s huge range and variety
1 L'OrfeoClaudio Monteverdi Mantua, Italy, c1607
With a mythological musician as hero, L'Orfeo ranks as the first great opera. Monteverdi was the "founding father" of operatic form. Euridice dies from a snake bite. The sorrowful Orpheus, through his music, tries to save her from the Underworld. A popular operatic subject (Gluck, Jaques Offenbach, Philip Glass), L'Orfeo is emotional, melancholy and transcendent.
A trailblazing queer writer: Carmen Maria Machado on They by Kay Dick
BooksAlthough this dystopian novel was first published in 1977, it was out of print for decades until a literary agent chanced upon it in a charity shop. Now it’s being re-issued – and it’s still deeply relevant
“I remembered how they began, a parody for the newspapers. No one wrote about them now.”
Dystopia was one of my first favourite genres, the beginning of the path away from the books of childhood.
Eleanor Summerfield | | The Guardian
ObituaryEleanor SummerfieldFilm, theatre and television actor as adept at drawing tears from her audience as laughsThe actor Eleanor Summerfield, who has died aged 80, shed some early comic light on the earnest, dark and intellectually pretentious plays of the postwar poetic revival in London theatre.
While the fashion for verse drama was later to bring Edith Evans in Christopher Fry's The Dark Is Light Enough, Laurence Olivier in that author's Venus Observed and Alec Guinness in TS Eliot's The Cocktail Party, in 1945 E Martin Browne was still struggling to re-establish the movement at the tiny Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill.
How It All Began by Penelope Lively - review
FictionReviewLives topple like dominoes in Penelope Lively's cunning new novelHow It All Began begins in uncharacteristically violent fashion: "The pavement rises up and hits her. Slams into her face, drives the lower rim of her glasses into her cheek." Charlotte, a retired schoolteacher in her late 70s, finds that she has been mugged and relieved of her house keys, bank cards and £60 in cash. As a reader, you share her sense of shock and bewilderment – after all, one might expect to be reasonably safe from street crime in a Penelope Lively novel; though the book introduces a number of elements you wouldn't ordinarily expect to find, including East European immigrants, chocolate cream frappuccinos and errant text messages used as a plot device.
Penthouse serves double fault over 'Kournikova' pics | Newspapers & magazines
Anna KournikovaAnna KournikovaNewspapers & magazinesPenthouse serves double fault over 'Kournikova' picsPenthouse magazine is facing two potentially crippling lawsuits over claims it published topless photographs of a Benetton heiress under the name of Anna Kournikova.
The tennis player confirmed she had filed a suit against the magazine just a day after it emerged that Judith Soltesz-Benetton, the daughter-in-law of Luciano Benetton, had launched a £7m lawsuit.
Penthouse yesterday apologised to both women for identifying the pictures incorrectly.
Romanian wedding traditions a photo essay | Romania
Jesica Monica Bura poses with her bridesmaids in her parents’ house in the village of Cămărzana. Photograph: Michal NovotnýIn Oaș, Romania, the photographer Michal Novotný has been documenting opulent summer weddings where traditional costumes meet the trappings of large-scale modern events
by Michal NovotnýIn a remote region in the north of Romania, there is a remarkable mixture of tradition and wealth. Residents of the Oaș region have been labouring for years in the west so that back home they can build magnificent houses and drive expensive cars.
The empty boots of German farmers tell a story of hardship, fuel wars and far-right threat | Eva von
OpinionGermanyThe empty boots of German farmers tell a story of hardship, fuel wars and far-right threatEva von RedeckerRural protests draw on a populist playbook. But farmers’ legitimate grievances could be addressed with progressive policies
In my local area in rural Brandenburg, every village signpost offers the same harrowing sight: a pair of wellingtons dangling from the metal frame, often marked with a cross sprayed on to the green rubber. The boots started appearing just before Christmas after the German government, a coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals, announced that tax exemptions for farm vehicles and diesel would be scrapped.
Top 10 books about Alaska | Books
Top 10sBooksTop 10 books about AlaskaFrom Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild to Jack London's White Fang, discover Brian Payton's favourite books about the land of big dreams and harsh realitiesWhat is Alaska? Rugged homeland of resilient Native Americans, former Russian colony, site of the only battle of the second world war to take place on US soil … wait a minute, second world war battlefield? Believe it. The blind spot most of us have about Alaska is nearly as vast as its geography – it's about seven times the size of the UK.
Vasylkiv: why this small Ukrainian town is now a big Russian target
UkraineWith a military airfield and control centre to defend, Vasylkiv’s mayor and populace are learning about war in real time
Russia-Ukraine crisis: live news Natalia Balasynovych, the mayor of Vasylkiv, woke up at 5.13am last Thursday and thought there was a fireworks display outside.
She quickly realised that, in fact, Vladimir Putin had launched an assault on Ukraine. Missiles were raining down on her town.
Vasylkiv is a pleasant, quiet town of 36,000 people about 20 miles outside Kyiv.
Central Places by Delia Cai review a return to ones roots
FictionReviewIn this assured debut, a Chinese-American woman tries to reconcile her teenage and adult selves on a visit to her parents
Delia Cai is a Vanity Fair writer, but this is not the droll, wise-cracking first novel one might expect. It is very different from Monica Heisey’s Really Good, Actually, or half a dozen other novels about women who hilariously haven’t quite got their lives together – and therein lies its charm.