In more than 70 documentaries, Stacey Dooley’s disarmingly light touch has taken her to the heart of many of society’s darkest issues. After 20 years of filming she thought she’d seen it all… Until she became a mother.

The broadcaster Stacey Dooley gave birth to her daughter, Minnie, in January 2023. Though she has reported on women for almost two decades, she has been surprised by the transformations of motherhood. “I went into it so unprepared,” she says. “I cannot begin to tell you.” Like other soon-to-be parents, Dooley decided against attending antenatal classes and rejected manuals offered by friends. “You know, I used to see mums finding it tough and I’d think, ‘It can’t be that hard.’ I really used to think that. Which is fucking hilarious. I owe all of those women an apology.”

Dooley and I are in a hotel café in Knightsbridge, west London, where she is later due to meet her accountant. She has written a book, Dear Minnie, in which she profiles women who have had different experiences of conception, pregnancy and labour. Dooley’s own pregnancy was comparatively straightforward: some sickness, a scheduled C-section, though “the sleep deprivation knocked me for six,” she says. “I’ve never in my life been that tired.” In the book, Dooley describes the first six months of Minnie’s life as an overwhelm of struggle and vulnerability. “My living room looked like a teenager’s bedroom,” she writes. Her partner, the dancer Kevin Clifton, with whom Dooley was coupled during the 2018 series of Strictly Come Dancing, was given two weeks of paternity leave before being hauled back to work. (Clifton is currently appearing in a UK tour of Chicago.) “I remember him leaving and shutting the front door and being like, ‘What the hell am I going to do now?’” Dooley recalls. “And I felt envious. That he was going to be sleeping from 10pm to 8am. I remember feeling jealous of that.”

Neguinho da Beija-Flor, 75, is the most recognisable voice in Rio de Janeiro’s elite carnival league and has led 50 consecutive parades for the same school

On Monday night, as 100,000 people gather in the stands and VIP boxes of the Marquês de Sapucaí Sambadrome to watch the second night of parades at Rio de Janeiro’s world-famous carnival, a voice that has resonated for half a century will be heard there for the last time.

It will be the final performance by Neguinho da Beija-Flor, 75, one of the country’s most famous samba singers, who is retiring after leading 50 consecutive parades for the Beija-Flor – or Hummingbird – school.

With a beauty that belies its name, the sea slug is an invertebrate that reminds me of a happy Scottish summer

It has been a long time since I’ve thought about nudibranchs, let alone spotted one. But a lifetime ago, as a zoology undergraduate at Glasgow University, I spent hours underwater, swimming through kelp forests, corals and shipwrecks, looking out for the tiny, colourful creatures.

Diving on the west coast of Scotland is spectacular for all the reasons you might expect: the drama of the islands, bays and meandering sea lochs against the mountains, the rugged rocky shores, the awe-inspiring wildness.

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.