The perfect morning routine.
Nipple daisies and a half-deflated netball. What really goes into the raunchy sex scenes of Bridgerton.
A neglected London penthouse transformed into a riot of colour and pattern.
Ohhh! Looks like we might be getting a Crown prequel.
The billionaire death cult that steers humanity’s destiny doesn’t do existential crises.
Travel the Orient Express from Paris to Tuscany. Good Lord, what a stunning train!
It’s been a minute, but—all the best looks of Royal Ascot 2026.
Looking forward to watching Daisy Edgar-Jones in a new version of an old classic.
Just watched: Season two of Patience. As a child, autistic Patience Evans discovered a love of criminology and solving puzzles through her detective father’s case files. Now an adult, Patience works in the Criminal Records department of the York police force, quietly cataloguing files and evidence. But her extraordinary ability to spot overlooked details and identify subtle inconsistencies soon catches the attention of DI Bea Metcalf, who gradually draws her into the world of active investigations. Patience’s self-taught expertise in criminology, exceptional memory, and unique way of seeing the world quickly prove invaluable. But while the murder mysteries provide the framework for the series, ultimately Patience is a story about relationships, belonging, and finding the confidence to step beyond the boundaries others have set for you. The show places as much emphasis on personal growth and workplace dynamics as it does on solving crimes. As trust develops between the team and Patience, a world that often feels loud, chaotic and difficult to decipher to her, begins to soften around the edges, and as each case new case pushes her a little further outside her comfort zone, her confidence grows. Running alongside the weekly mysteries is a more personal one: Patience’s search for answers about the mother who left when she was a child, leaving behind only a box marked with a cryptic sequence of numbers. I was caught a little off guard by season two’s introduction of a new detective (as was Patience!) especially one who, initially, is not kindly predisposed to her. Fortunately, this tension isn’t dragged out for too long, and DI Frankie, who is abrasive and spiky where DI Bea was calm and nurturing, brings a not unwelcome new vibe to the show. I really enjoy this series. It’s warm and gentle and quietly uplifting without being overly sentimental. I can’t speak for how it has been received across the autistic community, but it feels as though it approaches autism in a genuinely caring and respectful way. Ella Maisy Purvis, who is superb in the title role, is autistic herself, as are the other neurodivergent characters. The result is a lovely crime drama that feels authentic and compassionate, as interested in understanding people as it is in solving murders. Alas, Lucy Mangan at The Guardian doesn’t agree.
Just Read: The Mercy Step Marcia Hutchinson. On a bitterly cold December morning in a Yorkshire of 1962, the soon-to-be astonishingly precocious Mercy makes her deeply reluctant entrance into the world. Leaving the warm safety of her mother’s womb feels like a grave miscalculation, and the years that follow do little to change her mind, for Mercy arrives into a family where affection is in short supply and attention even scarcer. She has four siblings who seem to take particular delight in making her life difficult, a mother whose religious convictions verge on fanaticism, and a father prone to terrifying fits of rage. They are a Jamaican immigrant family stretched too thin by a lack of resources and weighed down by far too much disappointment and shame. It is an inauspicious beginning for a child who spends her first year in the hospital with pneumonia and grows up to become a girl far too perceptive for her own good, blessed—or cursed—with an uncanny ability to see through all the stories and self-deceptions the adults around her insist on repeating. Told entirely through the eyes of a child, with all the misunderstandings, mishearings, and inventive misspellings that entails, The Mercy Step carries us through the first eleven years of Mercy’s life. As she struggles to make sense of a bewildering adult world, Mercy finds solace in books and the far-flung corners of her imagination, her musings a tangle of wonder at the petty injustices of life. But she refuses to surrender to a world such as this. She confronts its cruelties head-on, fends off an array of ugly people and battles to protect her mother from her father’s violence, all while searching for a path to something better for herself. Bright and crisp, and devilishly twirly. The Mercy Step is a moving, bitingly hilarious portrait of resilience, imagination, and the determination to find hope and joy in a poisoned world.