Andrew Anthony's Blog

In the final part of a bravura trilogy detailing the struggle to bring war criminals to account, Sands tracks a former SS commander to Chile, where he found a friend in Augusto Pinochet

This is the concluding part of Philippe Sands’s extraordinary trilogy – part history, part moral investigation, part memoir – that documents the legal and personal battles to bring to account Nazi war criminals and their disciples.

In East West Street he recounted the plight of Lviv, the city now in Ukraine, whose Jewish population either fled before Nazi occupation or, like many of Sands’s extended family, was thereafter wiped out. Two Jewish lawyers who got out early were instrumental in creating the legal concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide that were introduced at the Nuremberg trials.

The pioneering food writer and historian talks of her fear of running out of words – even as she is writing her 22nd book

My lunch companion is a living institution. Self-taught cook, traveller, recipe collector, historian and anthropologist Claudia Roden has reshaped how we think about food, its cultural heritage and social meaning.

It’s not just celebrated chefs such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Moro’s Samantha Clark who pay tribute to her pioneering work. The historian Simon Schama once observed that “she is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Proust was a biscuit baker”.

The venerable magazine is thriving and its long-time editor David Remnick tells us why a dedication to literate, conversation-provoking and veracious reportage has never been more vital

Last month the New Yorker celebrated its 100th anniversary. It’s an impressive achievement because the magazine is the bumblebee of publishing: it flies in the face of prevailing wisdom. Just as the bee’s wingspan was once thought to be too small to keep it airborne, so does our smartphone-blitzed attention span appear too short for what the magazine offers.

Everything about the 10,000-word pieces, learned criticism and meticulous accuracy on which the weekly has built its reputation seems anachronistically at odds with the age of TikTok and X, influencers and instant opinion.

From Bath to Weybridge and Winchester to Lytham St Annes, padel’s ‘gunfire-like’ acoustics are making locals seethe

Across the affluent suburbs and well-heeled country towns and cities of England the sound of “gunfire” – or the fear of it – has been ringing out in recent months. From Bath to Weybridge and Winchester to Lytham St Annes a street battle of sorts has been waged as desirable neighbourhoods seek to repel what they see as a menacing new threat to the peace: the sport of padel.

“When the best players play, I can only describe it as like a bullet going right by you,” says Nick Christou, whose garden is a few yards from two padel courts at Hazelwood sports club in Enfield, north London.

A globe-spanning study of the waste industry reveals how wealthy nations dump their garbage on the poor while the rate at which we produce near-indestructible rubbish only increases

You know the drill: plastic and glass containers go in the blue recycling bin, paper and cardboard in the blue sack, vegetable matter in the green compost bin, and the rest in the grey general rubbish bin. Households up and down the land go through variations of these familiar refuse-sorting tasks each week. But where does it actually all go?

Into the trucks that pick them up, yes, but after that? It’s a kind of act of faith that we imagine our detritus that we’ve carefully – or not so carefully – categorised is transported to the right location where appropriate measures are taken to dispose of it in the most sensible and ecological manner.

From Home Alone to Succession and A Real Pain, the actor has added a unique twist to his roles and is tipped for a best supporting role award this weekend

On Sunday evening, Kieran Culkin is up for the best supporting actor award at the Baftas. If he wins, he will probably give one of his startled, free-wheeling and characteristically funny speeches, though by now he may struggle to express surprise, given his extended run of triumphs at these events.

In 2024, he picked up a Golden Globe for best actor in a television drama series for his performance as Roman Roy in Jesse Armstrong’s Succession. Last month, he nabbed the Golden Globe for best supporting actor for his role as Benji Kaplan in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain (he seems to respond well to direction from men called Jesse), which also landed him the four major American film critics awards, made him an odds-on favourite for an Oscar next month, and accounts for his Bafta nomination.

Sanjeev Bhaskar’s DI Khan remains stoical in the face of perfunctory dialogue; existential struggles hold up a new BBC crime drama; occasional sporting action accompanies Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl victory. Plus, both sides of the Battle of Mogadishu

Unforgotten (ITV1) | itv.com
Virdee (BBC One) | iPlayer
Live NFL Super Bowl LIX (Sky Sports/Now)
Surviving Black Hawk Down (Netflix)

As multinationals rush to appease the Orange One by ripping up their DEI policies, it can at least be said that British television is a lot less racially monochrome than it used be. Yet for all the inroads made into previously off-limits areas such as costume dramas, it’s still quite rare to see lead actors of colour. So it’s worth recognising that two primetime series on the most watched terrestrial channels last week featured South Asian-heritage actors in main roles, even if neither of them set the world on fire. The first, Unforgotten (ITV1), is now 10 years old, which is almost long enough to warrant its own cold case review.

A councillor’s alleged attempt to blow up a bird-prowling moggie reveals the pet-loving divide runs deep

The resignation last week of James Garnor, a parish councillor in Whittlebury, Northamptonshire, may look like further proof of the maxim, established by the infamous Jackie Weaver lockdown meeting, that low-level politics produce high-level emotions. However, the cause of his undoing was nothing as trivial as democratic principles; it illustrates a far more profound question that, sooner or later, we all confront: are you a cat or a dog person?

Garnor, we may safely conclude, is not a cat person. He quit following allegations that he rigged up a bird table with a firework device so that it exploded when a cat paid a visit. The consequences of this shocking but non-lethal incident, which took place back in 2023, have only now come to a head, but it’s fair to say that, as anti-cat statements go, a remote-detonated IED is at the extreme end of things.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

Six Brits sent to war-torn countries prove that travel doesn’t always broaden the mind; Luca Marinelli’s strutting Il Duce has a familiar ring. Plus, a Jane Austen drama with one thing missing…

Go Back to Where You Came From (Channel 4) | channel4.com
Mussolini: Son of the Century (Sky Atlantic/Now)
Miss Austen (BBC One) | iPlayer

Back in the mid-20th-century heyday of behavioural psychology, inventive professors were forever devising new experiments to study volunteers in extreme but revealing roleplay – as torturers, prisoners or prison guards. That’s all gone out of academic fashion, but there is one laboratory where a version of it still thrives: Channel 4.

In the 1970s a ‘nude biologist brandishing a cigar’ wrote a game-changing sex manual. Now, ‘Shazza’ is putting his story on the big screen

Sex positivity, polyamory, threesomes: they may not be universal practices but the extent to which they are more acceptable these days has a lot to do with a largely forgotten British polymath called Alex Comfort. In 1972, the physician, expert on molluscs and gerontologist published The Joy of Sex, the first popular book in the English language that explained and celebrated the art of making love.

A coffee table how-to guide with tasteful drawings of a naked couple in an imaginative range of sexual positions, it became a huge international bestseller and helped shift perceptions of sex some way along the procreational-recreational axis.