I suggest to my son that the object of going to the planetarium should be for him to learn something, not to catch the scientists out

Since it was half-term, I took the boy out for the day. My choice was the planetarium at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, which melds my two great loves: space and having to traverse the entirety of London, with a chatty six-year-old, twice in one wet afternoon. Our journey involves two buses, a tube, an overground, and 20 minutes of walking either side. Time was, all these various modes of transport would be a big plus for my son, who used to whoop and cheer as trains arrived and scream with contagious delight at every bus driver he met. As he moans about how long everything is taking, I realise for the first time that those mundane pleasures of the everyday world have left him. No wonder, I think with egregious lachrymosity, he has his eyes set on the stars.

Being a six-year-old, he is stocked with questions. We have both presumed he will get some time with space boffins, ready and eager to answer any queries from 4ft-tall astronomers in training. It’s just that my son is equally insistent that they’ll be eager to learn something from him. As we take our seats on the tube, he lays out his prolix plan: a set of 14 questions sorted into four distinct classes; 4 x easy, 4 x medium, 4 x hard, and 2 x EXTREME.

The pioneering Turner prize winner on being ignored for years, representing the UK at next year’s Venice Biennale, and the joys of Preston

Born in 1954 in Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania), Lubaina Himid moved to Britain when she was four months old. After studying at Wimbledon College of Arts and the Royal College, she trained as a theatre designer. From the mid-1980s, she was a pioneering artist and curator, organising significant exhibitions of black female artists, and making work on the themes of racism, feminism and cultural memory. A Fashionable Marriage (1986), her response to Hogarth, and Naming the Money (2004) – an installation of 100 life-sized cutouts which reimagined the lives of enslaved and forgotten black figures in European history – are now recognised as groundbreaking. She was the first black woman to win the Turner prize, in 2017, and last week it was announced that she will represent Britain at the 2026 Venice Art Biennale. Himid is now collaborating with her partner, the artist Magda Stawarska, on exhibitions at Mudam in Luxembourg and Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.

How do you feel about being chosen to represent Britain at the next Venice Biennale?
I’m so happy. It’s a huge honour and a huge challenge, but I’m determined to have a great time doing it. It’s such a dream venue. Venice is everybody’s favourite city, and the pavilion itself is so British, on the top of that little hill, trying to be very grand and actually quite domestic. I love making shows that work with the place they’re in.

• Six-time champion makes perfect start at factory Ducati
• Overtook brother, Alex, with three laps left in Thailand

Six-times MotoGP champion Marc Márquez continued his perfect start to life with factory Ducati as he completed a weekend double at the season-opening Thailand Grand Prix on Sunday, finishing ahead of younger brother Alex Márquez.

The sprint winner Marc Márquez got off to an electric start on pole in hot and humid conditions at the Buriram International Circuit but Alex, who had qualified second on the grid, managed to break free to take the lead in the seventh lap of the 26-lap race.

Netanyahu’s office says it is imposing blockade as Hamas will not accept plan that Israel says US envoy put forward

Israel has cut off humanitarian supplies to Gaza in an effort to pressure Hamas into accepting a change in the ceasefire agreement to allow for the release of hostages without an Israeli troop withdrawal.

The office of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Sunday it was imposing a blockade on Gaza because Hamas would not accept a plan which it claimed had been put forward by the US special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to extend phase one of the ceasefire and continue to release hostages, and postpone phase two, which envisaged an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

The 1965 musical has its faults but it remains a deserving and enduring point of reference for so many of us

Many of the formative films of my childhood come with crisp sense memories of the first time I saw them: precisely what cinema or whose couch, the time of day and the weather outside, who I was watching with, my in-the-moment reactions to what delights or shocks the film threw at me.

The Sound of Music, however, is an exception. Robert Wise’s swirling, swollen 1965 film version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical has been a personal favourite since long before I ever thought to list personal favourites – a seasonal staple, a constant generator of unprompted earworms, a point of good-natured familial conflict between those who love it and those who merely pretend not to, a film so laden with short-cut iconography that it rushes quickly to mind when I see a certain shade of upholstery, a particular bob haircut or even a passing nun.

With this year’s Oscars about to be handed out, Hollywood women of a certain age have never been more bankable or in demand. What’s behind the cultural shift?

Something seems different about Hollywood awards ceremonies. At the Golden Globes in January, at the Screen Actors Guild awards last month and in the list of nominees for Sunday’s Academy Awards, there’s a sense of cultural readjustment. There are not just women working the red carpets and in the running for gongs: there are successful, prominent and, crucially, prospering older women.

Demi Moore could win an Oscar to go with her Golden Globe for her leading role in the dark modern parable about cosmetic surgery The Substance. Isabella Rossellini is also nominated for an Oscar for the Vatican drama Conclave. Elsewhere there’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths, Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl, Nicole Kidman in Babygirl – and more.