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”.

Experiences raise questions about how telecoms firm treated small business owners, whose commission it cut

When Adrian Howe drowned in August 2018, his family found some solace in the support of his longtime employer.

The bond between the 58-year-old and Vodafone – the multinational mobile phone group for which Howe had worked for 20 years – was so tight that his funeral featured a wreath shaped like the company’s speech mark brand.

He is the prickly, hotheaded journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and torture at Abu Ghraib prison. Finishing 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.”

A brilliantly human photographer, he celebrated the overlooked, finding beauty in cheese sandwiches at a church fete or people queuing for ice cream at the beach – all while poking fun at Britishness

• Martin Parr dies aged 73
• Martin Parr: the photographer’s career in pictures

Martin Parr looked like “a naff birdwatcher”, according to his editor Wendy Jones. His appearance was so unassuming that he told me during a recent public talk, that while he was taking pictures during a recent seaside trip, some passersby remarked that he was “a bit like Martin Parr”. Unbothered by glitz and glamour, for more than five decades Parr purposefully pursued the most boring things he could find – he was unapologetic about the excitement he saw in a perfect cup of tea, a plate of beans on toast, or a woman filling up her car at a petrol station. He also knew that, with time, these supposedly dull things would become interesting.

Parr took delight in looking, without flattery, at the things you thought you already knew. In a Parr picture, beauty is not always graceful – the overflowing rubbish at New Brighton beach, the cucumber and cheese sandwiches wrapped in clingfilm at Shalfleet church fete (with the sign, please do take ONE cherry tomato). He made the mundane magnificent with his panache for saturated colours and surprising compositions. He was masterful at capturing the unexpected and unchoreographed interruptions that reveal the unpolished truth of the ordinary moment. He understood that the fluorescent glow of a chip shop could be as revealing as a cathedral; that the colour of a plastic beach bucket could anchor the entire mood of a nation; that the way a stranger holds a sandwich or an ice-cream speaks of class, of longing, of place, of the small stories that batter or buoy us daily. This radical attentiveness – this celebration of the overlooked – is what made Parr one of the most human photographers of our time.

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

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Photographer Jill Mead joined the Traveller community’s London Christmas drive on Saturday – a 14-mile trip by 200 or so horse-drawn carts and carriages through the capital, stopping at Buckingham Palace, Soho and Borough Market

Ukraine’s president says latest discussions on peace proposals with US were ‘constructive, although not easy’

• See all our Ukraine war coverage

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet the leaders of the UK, France and Germany in London on Monday to discuss the latest US-authored peace proposal aimed at ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Days of negotiations between US and Ukrainian officials ended on Saturday without an apparent breakthrough. The Ukrainian president called the discussions “constructive, although not easy”.

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.

Reform campaign accused by ex-councillor of falsely reporting expenses during Farage’s run to become MP last year

• UK politics live – latest updates

The Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, has been urged to “come clean” over his election campaign in Clacton after a former aide claimed his party breached spending rules.

Farage’s campaign has been accused of falsely reporting his election expenses during his successful run to become an MP last year.

Concerns over recording of meetings at coordination centre excluding Palestinians that was set up to provide support for Trump’s Gaza plan

Israeli operatives are conducting widespread surveillance of US forces and allies stationed at a new US base in the country’s south, according to sources briefed on disputes about open and covert recordings of meetings and discussions.

The scale of intelligence gathering at the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) prompted the US commander of the base, Lt Gen Patrick Frank, to summon an Israeli counterpart for a meeting to tell him that “recording has to stop here”.