‘The three sharks’: Wolff excited at possible F1 return of Ecclestone, Horner and Briatore

  • F1 heavyweight ‘supergroup’ linked to Alpine takeover

  • Formula One needs ‘the buzz’, says Mercedes principal

Toto Wolff has said he would welcome something of a Formula One supergroup returning to the sport in the form of Christian Horner, Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore potentially uniting to buy the Alpine team.

When asked at the Dutch Grand Prix what he thought of the concept, albeit a somewhat unlikely proposition despite rumours persisting that Horner is interested in purchasing Alpine if he can obtain the substantial financial backing required, the Mercedes principal was all in favour.

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The Guardian view on Christopher Marlowe: it’s time to read him and honour him | Editorial

England’s second most famous playwright is the star of a new play. But his own works should be staged more, and he should be commemorated better

For a limited season this autumn, Christopher Marlowe will become a star of the London stage again. Enjoy it while you can, for Marlowe has become an ephemeral figure in Britain’s national culture. His plays, once staples, are now produced only intermittently, if at all. Today, Marlowe is probably better known for his dramatic death, stabbed in a London riverside tavern, than for anything he wrote or for being the literary pioneer that he was.

From next week, however, the sexy and brilliant figure of Kit Marlowe will be the centrepiece character, played by Ncuti Gatwa, in Liz Duffy Adams’s two-hander, Born With Teeth, which is currently in previews in the West End, with its offical opening next week. The play teases with the possibility, first reported in this newspaper in 2016, that Marlowe and William Shakespeare, played by Edward Bluemel, collaborated on writing parts of the Henry VI trilogy. But not just that. Perhaps the two playwrights, both born in 1564, were lovers. And perhaps Shakespeare even had a hand in Marlowe’s murder in 1593.

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Continue ReadingThe Guardian view on Christopher Marlowe: it’s time to read him and honour him | Editorial

Former inmate guilty of murdering prison officer in Lancashire revenge killing

Elias Morgan, 35, shot former HMP Altcourse officer Lenny Scott four years after a row over an illicit phone

A former inmate has been found guilty of murdering a prison officer in a revenge killing, four years after saying “I promise I will get you.”

Elias Morgan, 35, planned and carried out the shooting of Lenny Scott, a former HMP Altcourse prison officer who had discovered Morgan’s illicit mobile phone hidden behind bars in his cell.

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EU accuses Putin of undermining peace talks after deadly strikes on Kyiv

All member states except Hungary back statement saying Russian ‘war crimes’ only increase EU support for Ukraine

European leaders have accused Vladimir Putin of undermining peace talks, after Russian missile strikes on Kyiv this week killed at least 23 people and damaged diplomatic buildings, including EU and British Council offices.

A day of mourning was observed in Kyiv on Friday, after the Russian air attack the day before that killed 23 people, including at least four children. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said eight people were still missing and 53 had been injured. “When instead of diplomacy, Russia chooses ballistics … the world must respond accordingly,” he said, urging western allies to impose further sanctions.

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‘He’s a jump-off-the-cliff kind of guy’: inside Francis Ford Coppola’s chaotic Megalopolis shoot

Mike Figgis’s documentary takes us on to the set of the director’s passion project to give as raw and intimate a portrait of an auteur at work as we’ve had for some time

‘Do you know why I’m doing this movie? What do I get out of it?” an exasperated Francis Ford Coppola asks Shia LaBeouf on the set of Megalopolis. “I don’t get money. I don’t get fame; I already have fame. I don’t get Oscars, I already have Oscars. What do I get that I want?” LaBeouf eventually gives up. “Fun!” Coppola says. “I wanna have fun!”

Making Megalopolis doesn’t look like most people’s idea of fun as Coppola attempts to corral actors, crew, costumes, locations, lavish sets and special effects all in service of a sprawling sci-fi-meets-ancient-Rome story that no one fully understands. Throw in the fact that the film-maker spent $120m of his own money on the passion project by selling off part of his winemaking business to raise funds, having spent nearly 50 years trying to get it made, and that the production was beset with delays, technical headaches and bust-ups, and you feel this is more than most 83-year-olds should have to go through.

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