Until she reached her 50s, the actor was a constant presence on stage and screen. Then the offers disappeared. Now, as her renaissance continues, she is taking on Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals

After six decades as an actor, Patricia Hodge says she still gets nervous before a play opens. “I think nerves are always the fear of the unknown,” she says. “Particularly with comedy, where there is no knowing how the audience will react: you’ve got to surf that.”

We meet on a sunny winter morning at the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond, south-west London, where Hodge is about to appear in The Rivals, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Richard B Sheridan play, in which she plays the ironic – sorry, iconic – Mrs Malaprop. “You’re sort of in a tunnel, your entire being is focused on this,” she says. She was here in rehearsals until 11pm the night before. Today, she is sitting at a table with a large coffee. Does she enjoy this bit, the putting together of a play? “I think it’s love-hate actually. The process is really why I do theatre.” She says she finds it energising, “but it’s also very trying, and you just don’t want to be left with your own limitations”.

He is the prickly, hotheaded journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and torture at Abu Ghraib prison. Making Cover-Up, a film about his astonishing life and countless scoops, was never going to be easy

One morning last month, Seymour Hersh set off to buy a newspaper. The reporter walked for 30 minutes, covered six blocks of his neighbourhood, Georgetown in Washington DC, and didn’t see a single sign of life. No newsstands on street corners selling the glossies and the dailies. No self-service kiosk where you can slide in a dollar and pull out a paper. “Finally, I found a drugstore that had two copies of the New York Times in the back,” Hersh recalls. He bought one for himself. He can’t help but wonder whether anybody bought the second.

Hersh was born in Chicago in 1937, the year the Hindenburg airship blew up and the aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific. That makes him a man of hot metal, the media’s ancient mariner, with metaphorical newsprint on his fingers and a cuttings file that reads like an index of American misadventure. Hersh has been a staff writer at the New York Times and the New Yorker. He’s broken stories on Vietnam, Watergate, Gaza and Ukraine. But the free press is in crisis, newspapers are in flux and investigative journalism may be facing a deadline of its own. “I don’t think I could do now what I did 30, 40, 50 years ago,” says the now 88-year-old. “The outlets aren’t there. The money’s not there. So I don’t know where we all are right now.”

There is a bread and circuses feel to this scandal. A wise public would see red flags; instead it sees entertainment

One upside of adversity is art, inspiring cultural output that seeks to process and channel suffering. “I’ll say one thing about Thatcher, some fantastic songs were written during her reign,” said the Irish singer Christy Moore once – before belting out a goosebump-raising rendition of Ordinary Man by Peter Hames, a song about the 1980s recession. That is, so far, the only upside of the publication of Olivia Nuzzi’s book American Canto, an affliction to journalism, politics and publishing: there has been some fantastic writing since it all kicked off.

Masterful reviews. Very funny commentary. Scathing analysis. But first, a summary of events for readers of this column, most of whom I assume are well-adjusted, offline people, with better things to do with their time than follow what can only be described as a niche beef. Nuzzi is (or perhaps was, keep reading) a celebrated US political journalist who had a “digital affair” with Robert F Kennedy Jr while he was running for president, broke all sorts of journalistic rules while doing so, and was fired from her job at New York magazine. RFK Jr went on to become Donald Trump’s anti-vaccine health secretary, Nuzzi has published a book about the whole affair, and her ex-fiance Ryan Lizza – another political journalist – has been dripfeeding revelations about how she cheated on him, and a litany of other personal and professional transgressions. There are no heroes here.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Egyptian’s calculated outburst is a challenge to management and their support for embattled Arne Slot

Mohamed Salah’s relationship with Liverpool is broken. That is abundantly clear after the incendiary interview at Elland Road on Saturday night that also poses a test of the club’s relationship with Arne Slot. The next revelation will be the extent of internal support for the coach who delivered Liverpool’s record-equalling 20th league title eight months ago.

Salah may have been emotional having been on the bench for the third successive game, but stunning waiting reporters not only by stopping to speak but by dropping a series of grenades during a post-match interview lasting more than seven minutes was not a case of heart ruling head. It never is when one of the greatest players to pull on the red shirt deigns to address the media. Whether it is criticism of contract negotiations, applying a little more pressure to get an agreeable deal done or, in this instance, piling more problems on Slot, Salah’s words are calculated to achieve what he wants.

Exclusive: Guardian investigation finds fake agencies using the social media platform to dupe Kenyans into paying for nonexistent jobs in Europe

Lilian, a 35-year-old Kenyan living in Qatar, was scrolling on TikTok in April when she saw posts from a recruitment agency offering jobs overseas. The Kenya-based WorldPath House of Travel, with more than 20,000 followers on the social media platform, promised hassle-free work visas for jobs across Europe.

“They were showing work permits they’d received, envelopes, like: ‘We have Europe visas already,’” Lilian recalls.

From digging trenches and building walls, to learning survival skills, Poland is increasingly aware of risks posed by its eastern neighbours

Cezary Pruszko still remembers the civil defence training of his Communist-era schooldays – map reading, survival skills, and a sense that the danger of war was real and ever present.

“My generation grew up with those threats. You didn’t have to explain why this mattered,” said the 60-year-old Pruszko, as he refreshed those skills at an army base outside Warsaw on a recent frosty Saturday morning. With dozens of other Polish civilians, he toured a bomb shelter, fitted gas masks and practised striking sparks from a flint to start a fire.

Exclusive: Watchdog finds 14% of cases not put on hospital waiting lists, with many reporting worsening health and rising anxiety

One in seven people in England who need hospital care are not receiving it because their GP referral is lost, rejected or delayed, the NHS’s patient watchdog has found.

Three-quarters (75%) of those trapped in this “referrals black hole” suffer harm to their physical or mental health as a result of not being added to the waiting list for tests or treatment.

Ukraine’s president set to meet the leaders of the UK, France and Germany in London on Monday

• See all our Ukraine war coverage

Donald Trump has said Volodymyr Zelenskyy “isn’t ready” to sign off on a US-authored peace proposal aimed at ending the war between Russia and Ukraine, at the end of three days of talks between Washington and Kyiv in Florida.

“I’m a little bit disappointed that President Zelenskyy hasn’t yet read the proposal, that was as of a few hours ago. His people love it, but he hasn’t,” Trump claimed as he spoke with reporters on Sunday night.

Fifteen organisations sign letter expressing deep concern over EHRC guidance being considered by ministers

New rules on access to single-sex spaces could pose a significant risk to the mental health of trans and non-binary people, according to 15 of the UK’s most respected mental charities.

Organisations including Samaritans, Mind, Centre for Mental Health and the Royal College of Psychiatrists have written to the equalities minister, Bridget Phillipson, to express their “deep concern” about guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) that is awaiting approval from the government.

Backlog delaying ‘shovel-ready’ ventures will be cleared with aim of building virtually zero-carbon power system by 2030

Britain’s energy system operator is pulling the plug on hundreds of electricity generation projects to clear a huge backlog that is stopping “shovel-ready” schemes from connecting to the power grid.

Developers will be told on Monday whether their plans will be dismissed by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) – or whether they will be prioritised to connect by either the end of the decade or 2035.