For tens of thousands of years, these Palaeolithic artworks were unseen. When they were rediscovered, onlookers marvelled at their vivid beauty. One of the world’s leading experts took me up close

The aurochs, the mammoth and the steppe bison are long extinct, but their painted likenesses still look relatively fresh across the walls and roofs of Altamira. Or so said Diego Garate Maidagan, who is one of the very few humans allowed to enter that exalted cave in northern Spain.

I met Garate last summer in a small Basque village called Gautegiz Arteaga. A professor of prehistory and Palaeolithic art at the University of Cantabria, he told me he’d been inside Altamira as recently as the week before, furthering his lifelong investigations of the prep work, tools and methodologies developed by early Homo sapiens painters.

In less than a decade, surrounded by screens, I lost my ability to read some of the best books ever written. But, inspired by the Guardian’s 100 best novels list, I was determined to get it back

It is a privilege to be surrounded by books. My parents hail from the literary working class, a subsection of society that believes great works lead to a richer life. Reading for them was an inverted form of class snobbery. My dad could read as well as anyone. He’d prove it on package holidays, sitting on the balcony the entire time, head bowed, cigarette in hand, flicking through the pages of Jane Austen or Herman Melville. The only difference between my old man and an old Etonian was the drudgery of employment. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: work is the bane of the reading class.

As for my own reading life, my mum wore me down, shouting “Read a book!” any time I dared say I was bored. I soon capitulated. I was nudged towards the classics, defined by Italo Calvino as books people say they should “reread” because they’ve either read them or do not want to admit they have not. In my late teens and 20s, I worked my way through the greats. I fell in love with a woman called George and thought Middlemarch was magic. I was a smart lad, prone to bad decisions, unsure of my place in the world. It is perhaps no surprise that I identified with Dorothea.

Towering over a low-income area of Chicago, and wrapped in a speech that’s hard to decipher, this controversial monolith feels like a menacing sci-fi HQ. Is it a monument – or a mausoleum?

The Egyptians had their pyramids. The Anglo-Saxons had their barrows. And the Americans have their presidential libraries – the chief difference being that the leaders the US venerates are usually still alive at the opening.

Lacking a royal family or a state religion, the US presidency has swelled to fill the void, transforming over the decades into a national personality cult, complete with its own secular temples to these powerful men. The latest pharaonic edifice is about to open on Chicago’s south side, where it looms on the skyline as a towering totem to the 44th president, Barack Obama. He might have seemed humble in office, but in his post-presidential, Netflix-producing afterlife, Obama has erected the largest, costliest and most audacious complex of them all. Behold the $850m Obamalisk – or, as it sometimes feels morbidly like, the Obamausoleum.

Austerity has benefitted bond traders but impoverished British society and led to the rise of populism. Is it right that we carry on adhering to their interests?

Should politics always be dominated by economics? Should questions about how governments and voters pay for things – whether by earnings, taxes or borrowing – be settled before we consider the wider consequences?

In an anxious capitalist democracy such as Britain, with a modern history of patchy economic success and intermittent but recurring crises over public debt, the answer may seem obvious: governments and voters always need to behave in ways that fit with the market forces that shape our economy.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

This affecting exploration of the troubled genius’s impact is packed with anecdote, sharp analysis and social context

In 1998, George Michael was arrested for public lewdness in an LA lavatory, an incident that finally led the singer to publicly come out. The following day, Sathnam Sanghera found himself unable to leave his room at university: the doorway had been mockingly plastered with tabloid newspaper headlines – “ZIP ME UP BEFORE YOU GO-GO!” – by fellow students aware of his longstanding fandom. As a writer, Sanghera is best known for a series of award-winning books on the British empire, which he calls his “specialist subject”. Judging by Tonight the Music Seems So Loud – not a biography so much as a miscellany, a set of themed essays that tend to digress in all kinds of intriguing directions – the life and work of one Georgios Panayiotou runs imperialism and its legacy a very close second.

It is an unashamedly partisan book, although not an uncritical one. Sanghera is as alive to Michael’s personal and professional failings (whether the naffness of some of his early work as one half of Wham! or his high-handed treatment of the duo’s other half, Andrew Ridgeley) as he is in love with his artistic triumphs. These, of course, range from Careless Whisper and Wham!’s annually inescapable Last Christmas to the 1996 solo masterpiece Older, a peculiar and peculiarly effective cocktail of raw grief at the Aids-related death of his lover Anselmo Feleppa and unrepentant horniness.

Government cites crime and drunken antics of foreigners as it shortens their stays – with ordinary Thais welcoming the crackdown

It’s late afternoon at Bangkok’s Khaosan road, the city’s backpacker strip. Bar staff are calling after passersby, enticing them inside with drinks promotions. The smell of cannabis, widely sold in the city, wafts into the street, where vendors sell anything from fake tattoos, flip-flops and icy fruit shakes.

This street, and its famously noisy nightlife, has attracted visitors from around the world for decades. But increasingly, some in Thailand are growing tired of the country’s party-loving visitors.

Documents also reveal internal Labour criticism of Keir Starmer in embarrassing detail

Peter Mandelson was receiving sensitive security briefings about the Foreign Office’s work, and was in discussions with the head of MI6, before he had completed the developed vetting process, newly released documents reveal.

Declassified emails show the ambassador designate and Richard Moore, the former chief of MI6 – a role known as “C” – had agreed to meet in early January 2025 before Mandelson went to Washington.

Documents were published to reveal what ministers knew about his links to Epstein, but instead exposed government rifts

• What is new in the latest release of Peter Mandelson documents?

Peter Mandelson wrote to David Lammy on 18 November 2024, making a simple promise to the foreign secretary: “If you were minded to appoint me [as ambassador to Washington],” he said, “I would make sure you never regret it.”

Since then, senior government figures, including Lammy and the prime minister, Keir Starmer, have had reason to look back at that appointment with almost nothing but regret.

Emails and WhatsApp messages reveal string of exchanges with ministers when he was president of Global Counsel

Peter Mandelson, as president of his then advisory firm Global Counsel, lobbied hard for ministers to attend his events and to meet his firm’s staff in the months after Labour’s general election win, newly released documents reveal.

Emails and WhatsApp exchanges show how active the Labour peer was after the election to work his contacts within government to the potential advantage of both his company and his then campaign to be chancellor of Oxford University.

Dozens injured and people trapped under rubble of fallen buildings after attacks on Kyiv, Dnipro and Kharkiv

Russian air raids on major Ukrainian centres including Kyiv, Dnipro and Kharkiv have killed at least 11 people, injured dozens and left others trapped.

Russia launched 73 missiles and 656 drones at Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian air force, with the main targets including Kyiv, the central city of Dnipro and the eastern cities of Poltava, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Ukrainian air defences destroyed or suppressed 40 missiles and 602 drones.