My home city is dismissed as a tragic joke. I used to pretend to be from somewhere else, but now I’m proud of my roots

It’s curious, what escapes people’s idea of rudeness. For instance: pointing out someone’s weight is a unanimous no-go, but height – surely even more arbitrary – continues to be fair game. Ditto commenting derogatorily on where someone’s from – at least, as long as it’s Birmingham, England’s second city and first punchline for jokes about idiotic accents and general urban bleakness.

As an unusually tall woman who grew up in that much-maligned metropolis, I have direct experience of both, and can confirm that while they’re equally annoying, the latter is much more pernicious. It is extraordinary what comes out of generally polite people’s mouths when I tell them I’m from Birmingham – from hilarious faux condolences to variations on, “Oh, I hear it’s horrible.”

Emily Watkins is a freelance writer based in London

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A spiced chocolate and hazelnut hot cross bun-inspired pudding with boozy amaretto whipped cream, and apple and rhubarb crumb bars

This easy-to-share crumb bar is inspired by the apple pie at the Polish cafe near my children’s school, and it’s the perfect treat for a relaxed Easter gathering. A golden pastry base, which cleverly doubles as the crumble topping, holds the tender apple and rhubarb fruit filling, and a thin meringue layer strikes just the right balance of buttery, sweet, and tangy. Meanwhile, a pudding that creates its own sauce while baking always feels magical. The secret lies in the different densities of the batter and the liquid poured over it just before baking – during its time in the oven, the two layers separate into a cake with a rich, molten sauce beneath. It’s a clever (and delicious) trick.

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Forty-seven teams have gone into second legs trailing by three or more goals. Only four have turned it around

By Opta Analyst

What a night it was for Arsenal. A Champions League quarter-final at home to holders and perennial winners Real Madrid, and a resounding 3-0 victory . Two stunning free-kicks from Declan Rice and another impressive finish from Mikel Merino put them in a commanding position but, crucially, it was only the first leg.

Real Madrid did not wait long before making noises about overturning the deficit at the Santiago Bernabéu. “The possibilities of qualifying are quite low, but we have to try 100%,” said the manager, Carlo Ancelotti. “We have to do all we can. It’s an opportunity to show a response to a poor game. In football, everything can happen. We need to believe. We need to have trust because, sometimes, a lot of times in the Bernabéu, it happened.”

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An actor’s story becomes a thrillingly radical deconstruction of family relationships and the social roles we play

There is an eeriness to great acting. Studied movements take on life; a living other emerges. Bad acting achieves no such uncanniness. Excessively self-conscious, the failing actor never dissolves into their role. We watch them watching themselves act.

Although we rarely see her on stage, the actor narrating Audition, Katie Kitamura’s unnerving, desperately tense fifth novel, never stops watching herself perform. Even passing, offhand phrases seem to fray under the strain of an unsustainable self-awareness. “You might think that people wondered how we did it,” she says, describing the comfortable Manhattan lifestyle she shares with her husband. The perspectives are tortuous, unmanageable. Who is this “you” that might imagine their way into the opinions of unseen others? As the novel progresses, these gazes are experienced as social roles both longed for and resisted. “How many times had I been told how much it meant to some person or another, seeing someone who looked like me on stage or on screen,” she says, one of many moments in the novel in which ethnicity is both present and absent at once: acknowledged, but never explicitly named.

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March annual rate comes before expected rise because of household bills going up this month

UK inflation dropped to 2.6% in March, increasing the pressure on Bank of England policymakers to cut interest rates next month.

Prices growth was weak ahead of an expected rise in April as households begin to pay higher council tax and utility bills.

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Juliette Pavy’s photographs of eco expeditions bring an element of lyrical storytelling to the global impact of invisible pollutants, from the Mediterranean to the Arctic

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Dutton has taken the Liberal party further to the right, but his strategy of aping the US president could be unravelling as Trump tariffs cause chaos

• See all our Australia 2025 election coverage

Peter Dutton, the man who would be prime minister of Australia, is one of the hard men of the country’s politics.

So, with Australia facing a federal election now set for 3 May, it was not a huge step for him to start road-testing some of the language and policies of Donald Trump after his win in the US last November.

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The north of England’s most overlooked natural beauty spot is home to wild terrain and some of the UK’s rarest birds, including the spectacular hen harrier

A grey male drifts slowly across the moorland. No, not me, but a big, beautiful hen harrier, scouting for love, or breakfast. I’ve only been here 10 minutes, and I’m in a mild state of shock. Aren’t these precious, threatened birds of prey so vanishingly rare that seeing one is hugely improbable?

I’m walking with Sonja Ludwig, RSPB species and habitats officer for the Forest of Bowland , and she knows these harriers . “They’re ‘traditional’ birds,” she says. “They tend to come back to more or less the same place. We always see them here. Rookies always notice the males first. Their plumage, white rump and the black tips on the wings are unmistakable.”

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Hannah’s second feature about her husband follows him on tour, but the offstage footage is rather less compelling than the music

Daryl Hannah has made another film (after Paradox in 2018 ) about her musician husband Neil Young; this one is about his recent 15-date solo tour of outdoor arenas on the US west coast. It works best when the living legend is on stage, cheerfully and unselfconsciously performing just like it’s 1972 and regaling the whooping audience with his comments: “Steve Stills gave me this guitar – I wrote a lot of songs on this sucker!”; “I’m so happy I was here before AI was born!” He really is utterly open and unpretentious.

But the movie itself tests the fanbase loyalty to the limits by being pointlessly and uninterestingly shot in arthouse black-and-white (though it exasperatingly bleeds out into colour over the closing credits) and by including an awful lot of material on the tour bus which is – how to put this? – not very interesting. Neil likes to ride up front with the driver, Jerry Don Borden by name, who becomes almost this film’s star. Bafflingly, Hannah uses a huge amount of tour bus footage from a locked-off camera position, not next to Neil, but at the driver’s seat right by Jerry, whose beaming face and steering wheel loom into the screen almost interminably. At one stage, we hear from him at some length on the subject of Howard Hughes, while Neil nods along, way in the background.

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