The Guardian

‘I was singing Luther Vandross covers in a club and a woman said: “This is as good as it’s going to get for you.” I went home and wrote Dreams’ When I was 12, I got up in the school canteen and sang a song I’d written called Teenage Love. A few years later, as I left school, everyone went: “Hope we you see on Top of the Pops, ha ha!” As if that would ever happen. A woman wasn’t allowed to look imperfect on TV, and I had a lazy eyelid. People would say: “Stop winking at me.” Singers on Top of the Pops all had long hair and beautiful clothing. I didn’t. I’d sing in my brother’s suits because I didn’t have the figure or the clothing.

Lawyer asks law enforcement to investigate claims of sexual assaults by rapper and his wife between 2005 and 2017 Four women who accuse the rapper Clifford “TI” Harris and his wife, the singer Tameka “Tiny” Harris, and members of their inner circle of drugging and sexually assaulting them are seeking a criminal investigation.

In a drama written by artificial intelligence, the computer’s imagination touches on themes of love and loneliness – but is mostly obsessed with sex Kazuo Ishiguro, whose new novel

From Regina King in thousands of sequins to Daniel Kaluuya in Dior, here are the best looks from Beverly Hills to stars’ front rooms

Brea Grant is menaced by a masked intruder, night after night, in a time-loop thriller that makes a vehement statement about society’s attitude to women This clever thriller teeters on the brink of abstraction, and walks a razor wire between horror and an incredulous absurdity meant to stand for how women must live in the modern world: the daily toll of living in fear of aggression, physical assault and withstanding the misogynistic structures that excuse them. At 2.29am one night, writer May (Brea Grant) peers over her balustrade to see an interloper, features blurred by a gel mask, staring up at her from the backyard. When she retreats to bed to tell husband Ted, he is disturbingly blase: “Honey, that’s the man. The man that comes every night and tries to kill us.” Ted manages to off the housebreaker with a pool cue, but his body disappears within seconds. The next night, and the next, May must do it all over again.

Following a recent similar Royal Mint slip-up, the Westminster Collection’s new 50p coins have sent Carroll experts down an internet rabbit hole to source false quotes As Oscar Wilde famously never said, don’t trust Goodreads as a source for quotes. A month after

Diddy, and Notorious BIG’s mother and others discuss dark rumours and chart the rapper’s rise to fame in this significant documentary Perhaps posthumous legacy was always on the mind of late rapper Christopher “Notorious BIG” Wallace. His impactful debut album Ready to Die was followed by Life After Death, released 16 days after he was killed aged 24, in a still-unsolved, drive-by shooting. Yet while there have been several filmic attempts to capture this legascy –– including

The rapper’s arrest shows Spain has a problem with freedom of ideology. But people shouldn’t be scared to write songs that stand up to power The arrest of Pablo Hasél this month, a Spanish rapper – like me – who is accused of glorifying terrorism and insulting the monarchy in his lyrics, didn’t surprise me. When I was 18, I wrote a song about the Spanish king, the police arrested me and I was sentenced to three and a half years in jail. The day they came to take me to prison, I fled to Belgium and have been here ever since, despite the best efforts of Spain to have me extradited. It seemed like a joke – almost four years in jail for a song. But it wasn’t: there are 18 rappers in Spain facing jail for similar charges.

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The Booker winner’s brilliant eighth novel expands on his theme of what it means to be not-quite-human, exploring love and loyalty through the eyes of an android In a 2015 interview with the

Despite the furore over the HFPA’s lack of diversity, the Golden Globes turned out to (mostly) reward the right films, led by the excellent Nomadland

Three lighthouse keepers in 70s Cornwall vanish in an elegant update of an early 20th-century mystery Anyone who grew up in Scotland in the 70s and early 80s can tell you about the lighthouse keepers of the remote Flannan Isles in the Outer Hebrides in the early 20th century. The story of the three men who settled down to eat only to seemingly vanish into thin air haunted my childhood – and it would appear that of Emma Stonex too. The author’s first novel under her own name transports the location to the close-knit but still remote Cornish coast and updates the action, plausibly, to 1972 – an era when mobile phones don’t exist – before flashing forward to 1992 when an investigative journalist believes he has uncovered the truth but needs the men’s very different widows and girlfriends to prove it. These tweaks apart, events remain unnervingly similar: the stopped clocks; the unfinished meals; the log that records a heavy storm despite clear skies that week; the mysterious visitor.

A feature-length film focuses on their long fight for justice. Plus: MasterChef is back. Here’s what to watch this evening

Netflix royal drama and Chloe Zhao were toast of the the night amid technical difficulties and against background of diversity issues