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© Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
© Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York
Live, rolling coverage of business, economics and financial markets as FTSE 100 oil company pays out $5.7bn to shareholders
Next has reported bumper sales between May and July, as sunnier UK weather and a disruptive hack at rival M&S sent customers flocking to the clothes and homewares retailer.
Full price sales at Next in the thirteen weeks to 26 July surged by 10.5%, which was £49m ahead of its guidance for the period for a 6.5% rise in takings.
In the UK, we believe that the over-performance was largely due to better than expected weather and trading disruption at a major competitor.
EUROPE’S STOXX 600 UP 0.15%
GERMANY’S DAX UP 0.32%
FRANCE’S CAC 40 UP 0.1%; SPAIN’S IBEX UP 0.98%
EURO STOXX INDEX UP 0.24%; EURO ZONE BLUE CHIPS UP 0.29%
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© Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA
© Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA
© Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA
The first episode of this comedy, about a woman who has to rebuild her life after her husband leaves, is bad – really bad. But it gets better, in a brain-melting sort of way …
Leanne Morgan came to standup relatively late. Born and raised in rural Tennessee, she got married at 26 to her college sweetheart and raised three children while the couple built a jewellery business together. It was the door-to-door selling she did and the Tupperware parties she hosted for extra income that first got her a local reputation for being funny and then led to bookings at comedy gigs. But it wasn’t until 2018, when she hired a social media relations team to promote clips of her act online and they went viral, that her comedy career took off and real fame beckoned. Two years ago, when she was 57, Netflix first broadcast her hour-long standup show I’m Every Woman, which she was performing on a 100-city tour. It shows the audience eating out of her hand as she takes them down the highways and byways of marital and menopausal life. Now she is the lead in a new Chuck Lorre-produced sitcom Leanne.
It is best to be upfront about these things and say that the opening episode is bad. Worse than you’ve just assumed when I said “bad.” Gone is the lightness of touch, the consummate ease, the subtly immaculate timing of her stage show; instead, we have a leaden script punctuated by a desperate laughter track, and a one-note performance by Morgan as “Leanne”, a menopausal woman closing in on 60, whose husband, Bill (Ryan Stiles), has just run off with a younger woman after 33 years of what his wife had thought was a perfectly happy marriage.
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© Photograph: Patrick McElhenney/Netflix
© Photograph: Patrick McElhenney/Netflix
© Photograph: Patrick McElhenney/Netflix
The writer-director defied expectations to turn the film Fargo into one of the best TV shows of the decade. Now he’s taking on an even bigger franchise. Can lightning strike twice?
When it was first announced in 2013, the thought of Fargo being reimagined as a TV miniseries felt practically sacrilegious. The 1996 neo-noir starring Frances McDormand as a kindly Minnesota police chief was a singular film that had won two Oscars. Surely its distinctive Coen brothers vibe would get shredded in the woodchipper of TV adaptation?
Back then, Noah Hawley, the screenwriter who took on the job, would have agreed. “It seemed like such a terrible idea,” he says via video call from a Long Island holiday bolthole. “Which is sort of why I liked it. The risk/reward was really high.”
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© Photograph: Copyright 2025, FX. All Rights Reserved.
© Photograph: Copyright 2025, FX. All Rights Reserved.
© Photograph: Copyright 2025, FX. All Rights Reserved.
Leanne has banned Wes’s hands-free hydrator because it’s a ‘turnoff’. You decide whose argument holds water
Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror
It looks like a drip and reminds me of a hospital. If he needs a drink, a cup is more appropriate
I get that it was maybe insensitive to do it during sex, but I didn’t expect her to be so bothered
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© Illustration: Igor Bastidas/The Guardian
© Illustration: Igor Bastidas/The Guardian
© Illustration: Igor Bastidas/The Guardian
Exclusive: Survey of officers in England and Wales reveals symptoms so severe that some have had multiple surgeries
Musculoskeletal damage, crushed testicles and lumps in breasts are just some examples of the harm police officers say they experience because of ill-fitting, uncomfortable and low-quality uniforms.
Officers responding to the first national uniform and equipment survey across all 43 forces in England and Wales reported symptoms so severe that some had to have multiple operations.
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© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
Critics have described the one-sided deal as an admission of weakness, and a dark day for Europe. They are absolutely right
The Suez crisis in 1956 was a humiliating moment of truth for the UK. Faced with implacable opposition from the US, Anthony Eden’s government was forced to abandon military action in Egypt. Capitulation to American pressure was a recognition of Britain’s diminished status on the world stage.
The trade deal agreed between Washington and Brussels this week lacks the drama of troops being sent in to recapture one of the world’s key waterways, but it is the EU’s Suez moment all the same. What’s more, European politicians know as much.
Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist
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© Composite: GuardianDesign/EPA/AFP/Getty/Reuters
© Composite: GuardianDesign/EPA/AFP/Getty/Reuters
© Composite: GuardianDesign/EPA/AFP/Getty/Reuters
More than 40 years on from its first publication, this exploration of one woman’s thoughts and fantasies is a gem worthy of rediscovery
There’s no getting around it: Dreaming of Dead People is an extremely strange book. Born in 1941, Rosalind Belben was first published in the 1970s; this, her fourth novel, first came out in 1979. Her eighth and most recent, Our Horses in Egypt, won the James Tait Black award in 2007.
Dreaming of Dead People might best be described as an early example of autofiction: its narrator, Lavinia, is the same age as Belben was at the time of writing, and she recalls a similar childhood in Dorset, including a father who was a Royal Navy commander and who was killed when she was three. Belben has described the book as “a study of the human figure”, and given its parallels with her own life story and its raw and deeply personal style any reader could be forgiven for assuming that the figure is her own.
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© Photograph: Giovanni Giovanetti/Bridgeman Images
© Photograph: Giovanni Giovanetti/Bridgeman Images
© Photograph: Giovanni Giovanetti/Bridgeman Images
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