With ruffled blouses, ballet flats and midriffs aplenty, show offers welcome and easy-to-wear familiarity

Few trends have been rebranded for the mainstream quite like “boho”.

Yet at the Chloé show in Paris, on day three of its fashion week, creative director, Chemena Kamali, doubled down on her efforts to push her easy breezy coolness and cash registers in the most relaxed way possible. She doesn’t mind the word, but prefers to describe her clothes as “romantic”.

Murray Auchincloss paid £5.4m in 2024 as oil company ditched green investment strategy

BP cut the pay of its chief executive after a chastening year in which the British oil company missed profit targets and ditched its green investment strategy as it came under pressure from a US-based activist investor.

Murray Auchincloss’s pay decreased by 30% to £5.4m for 2024, according to the company’s annual report, published on Thursday.

The president’s hardball negotiating tactics are nowhere to be seen as he sends billions in new weapons to Netanyahu

In his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, Donald Trump barely mentioned Gaza or the wider Middle East, making only a passing reference to bringing back US hostages held by Hamas militants in Gaza. He didn’t even expound on his plan for the US to take over the devastated territory and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”, while expelling 2 million Palestinians to neighboring Arab countries.

But Trump is already going down the same failed path as his predecessor, Joe Biden, who sent Israel a virtually unlimited supply of weapons – and failed to use US political cover at the United Nations and billions of dollars in arms as leverage to stop Israel’s war on Gaza. On 1 March, the Trump administration announced it had approved $4bn in new weapons to Israel under emergency authorities, meaning the deal would bypass even a perfunctory review in Congress. A day later, Benjamin Netanyahu banned all food and other aid deliveries to Gaza, imposing a new siege that threatens to collapse a fragile ceasefire reached in January.

Steven Soderbergh’s spy comedy sends two married agents after a mole, who might turn out to be one of them

The months and years drag on with no new James Bond, no clear indication of how he is to be repurposed as IP. Into this vacuum has rushed a new generation of spy stories on streaming television: action-intelligence office procedurals such as Black Doves, The Day of the Jackal, Slow Horses and indeed The Agency, starring Michael Fassbender, remade from the French show Le Bureau Des Légendes. These are secret agent dramas that give us the violence and the tech, juxtaposing suspected treason and infidelity in the traditional way, but with a new kind of workaday realist sexiness, and more elaborately about showing up for work: much emphasis on ID badges of various security-clearance levels that beep on card readers and can be worn round your neck on lanyards.

Steven Soderbergh’s downbeat, affectless tongue-in-cheek spy comedy (“caper” isn’t quite right) is in this new mode, though taking itself to the edge of self-satire, with a few 007 refugees in the cast, efficiently scripted by David Koepp. It is very much part of Soderbergh’s auteur business model: another new movie shot with limber energy on digital – Soderbergh is as much an evangelist for digital as others are for celluloid – whose budget is perhaps largely taken up by fees for the stars whose prestige gets this into cinemas.

Adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage will train people from the north-east to take on their first ever acting roles

His plays have been buzzy, hot-ticket openings in the West End and at the National Theatre. Films he has written have had glitzy debuts in Cannes and Venice.

But for the next world premiere of a Lee Hall show, head to the Methodist church in a former mining village in County Durham.

The singer-songwriter on breaking up his band, recovering from a stroke, being too old to be a punk, and the chaos of recording with Mark E Smith

In these deeply troubled, fractured, febrile times, why did you call the new record Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation? smileywombat
It was Grace’s choice [Grace Maxwell, his wife and musical collaborator]. Up in Helmsdale [in the Scottish Highlands], in my studio, I have an art deco radiogram speaker which has a sort of sunburst thing with that phrase written on it. For £60 on eBay – pristine! It was the BBC World Service motto. When we were casting about for a title for the new record, it seemed like a great expression. Grace said, if you’re going to call it that you have to write a song with that title. So I did.

I very much enjoyed the new song Knowledge and the video, shot in Helmsdale. Do you like to travel much these days or are you pretty much happy at home? nogs09
I like Helmsdale, and Grace loves it. When I was seven, eight years old, I spent every holiday in Helmsdale, walking with Stuart, my grandfather. And, one year, Mum and Dad said, I think we’ll go to Spain. I said, you can go wherever you like – I’m going to Helmsdale. We’ve been abroad loads of times since I had the stroke [in 2005] – to Japan once, to Australia. But I love getting home to the studio. That fragrance of the air. The fresh air. It’s beautiful.