Forget grooming to Zoom – 18th-century men were first to make up

As sales of cosmetics for men soar, book reveals industry’s first boom was in 1700s

Male cosmetics are no longer the preserve of rock stars, with data showing sales are booming. But a new book by a historian at the University of Exeter reveals that far from being a modern trend, grooming products for men were popular centuries before being advocated by the likes of Russell Brand, David Bowie and Prince.

Dr Alun Withey says it all started in the 1750s. “The 18th century is actually the beginning of the market for men’s cosmetics that we see today,” he says, noting there was a “new focus on refining the body, so personal grooming becomes important”.

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Restoration influencer: how Charles II's clever mistress set trends ahead of her time

Hortense Mancini’s celebrated London salon allowed her female peers the freedoms men enjoyed

There were few places in 17th-century London where women could embrace the same economic and intellectual freedoms as men. Hortense Mancini’s salon next to St James’s Palace was one of them, new research reveals – yet its influence in Restoration society has largely been dismissed throughout history.

Mancini, a mistress of Charles II, was a renowned Italian beauty who famously fled to England dressed as a man to escape her abusive aristocratic husband. But she also wielded her fame and status to create a subversive space in London where royal mistresses could meet, gamble, drink champagne and discuss science and literature on an equal footing with men, according to Annalisa Nicholson, a researcher in French Studies at Cambridge University.

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Dark side of wonderland: ahead of V&A show, book explores Alice’s occult link

As museum prepares to celebrate Lewis Carroll’s heroine, ties to mysticism and magical societies have come to light in a new work, Through a Looking Glass Darkly

Great art spawns imitation. And great weird art, it seems, spawns still weirder flights of fancy. Lewis Carroll’s twin children’s fantasies, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There have both inspired a string of adaptations, artistic and musical responses down the generations.

Now, as the Victoria & Albert Museum prepares to celebrate Alice and her cultural influence in Curiouser & Curiouser, a landmark exhibition next month, a new book containing unseen original images is to expose the secrets behind the darker world of the second Alice story.

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Olga Tokarczuk's 'magnum opus' finally gets English release – after seven years of translation

The Books of Jacob, praised by the Nobel prize judges and winner of Poland’s prestigious Nike award, will be published in the UK in November

The magnum opus of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk – a novel that has taken seven years to translate and has brought its author death threats in her native Poland – is to be published in English.

The Books of Jacob, which will be released in the UK in November, is the Polish author’s first novel to appear in English since she won the 2018 Nobel prize for literature for what judges called “a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”.

Related: Olga Tokarczuk: ‘I was very naive. I thought Poland would be able to discuss the dark areas of our history’

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Writ in water, preserved in plaster: how Keats' death mask became a collector's item

The recent sale of a cast for £12,500 is a testament to the Romantic poet’s enduring legacy, on the bicentenary of his death

There’s no mention of John Keats’s name on his tombstone – in fact you might accidentally pass right by it while strolling through the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome, were it not for its distinctly dour epitaph. “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” is the bitter description, etched at Keats’s dying request, the final sentiment from a poet who believed his words would fade into oblivion.

When Keats died from tuberculosis aged 25, on 23 February 1821, the furniture in his room – now a museum – was burned. But his face was shaved and prepared, so a plaster cast could be applied to preserve his likeness. Now, 200 years on, two versions of Keats’s death mask produced by two castmakers circulate galleries, auctions and private collections for large sums. Their value is a testament to Keats’s enduring appeal; Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak owned one and would reportedly take it from its box next to his bed to stroke its forehead.

Related: John Keats: five poets on his best poems, 200 years since his death

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Canada spy agency unwittingly seeks double agent in Le Carré ad gaffe

CSIS included quote from A Perfect Spy in tweet about job postings, bewildering Twitter users

For an intelligence agency seeking new recruits, the promises of adventure and intrigue found within the pages of famous spy novels might seem like a useful recruiting tool.

But promoting a double agent who lies to his family, betrays his country and ultimately takes his own life, is possibly not a strategy that will produce the best candidates.

“You could be the perfect spy. All you need is a cause.” ― John le Carré, A Perfect Spy.

What’s your cause? See if it aligns with a rewarding career at #CSIS: https://t.co/vEGTS8Am2n pic.twitter.com/AtPSNQk6GM

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Paul McCartney to publish 900-page lyrical 'autobiography'

The Lyrics, a ‘self-portrait in 154 songs’, will look at the people, places and circumstances behind songs written in boyhood, with the Beatles and beyond

It will be “as close to an autobiography” as Paul McCartney “may ever come”: the former Beatle is set to publish The Lyrics, a deep dive into his life, based on conversations he had with the prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon.

The Lyrics, a two-volume, 900-plus page “self-portrait in 154 songs”, will be released on 2 November. It will be “a kaleidoscopic rather than chronological account” of McCartney’s life, said publisher Allen Lane, and will cover the musician’s earliest boyhood compositions – he wrote his first song at 14 – through the Beatles catalogue to Wings, solo albums and his present life. The book will cover “the circumstances in which they were written, the people and places that inspired them, and what [McCartney] thinks of them now”.

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Key aide said Covid was 'the best thing that ever happened' to Biden, book says

• Anita Dunn said privately what aides ‘would never say in public’
• Cautious campaigning won pandemic battle with Trump
• US politics – live coverage

A senior adviser to Democrat Joe Biden in his campaign for president believed “Covid is the best thing that ever happened to him”, a new book reports.

Related: Ruling on Trump tax records could be costliest defeat of his losing streak

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights bookshop, dies aged 101

Poet and countercultural pioneer put on trial for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl went on to become a beloved icon of San Francisco

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, publisher, painter and political activist who co-founded the famous City Lights bookshop in San Francisco and became an icon of the city himself, has died aged 101.

Ferlinghetti died at home on Monday night. His son Lorenzo said that the cause was interstitial lung disease.

Related: Lawrence Ferlinghetti: ‘Most of the poets were on something, but somebody had to mind the shop’

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Hillary Clinton to publish thriller set in aftermath of US political turmoil

State of Terror, written by Clinton and author Louise Penny, will follow a novice secretary of state after ‘four years of American leadership that shrank from the world stage’

Hillary Clinton is teaming up with the award-winning thriller author Louise Penny to write an “international political thriller” in which a secretary of state joins the administration of “a president inaugurated after four years of American leadership that shrank from the world stage”.

Related: Hillary and Chelsea Clinton: ‘We cannot give in. That’s how they win’

Related: Printing money: 10 of the richest book deals of all time

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Amos Oz accused of 'sadistic abuse' by daughter in new memoir

Galia Oz claims late author – hailed as Israel’s greatest – beat and humiliated her in childhood, but siblings say they remember him differently

The daughter of the late Israeli author Amos Oz has alleged that her father subjected her to “a routine of sadistic abuse” in a new memoir, claims that have been challenged by his family.

Galia Oz, a children’s author, published her autobiography, Something Disguised as Love, in Hebrew on Sunday. “In my childhood, my father beat me, swore and humiliated me,” she writes, in a translation published by the newspaper Haaretz. “The violence was creative: He dragged me from inside the house and threw me outside. He called me trash. Not a passing loss of control and not a slap in the face here or there, but a routine of sadistic abuse. My crime was me myself, so the punishment had no end. He had a need to make sure I would break.”

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The 120 Days of Sodom: France seeks help to buy 'most impure tale ever written'

Tax breaks announced for companies who pay for manuscript by the Marquis de Sade, valued at €4.5m

The French government is appealing for corporate help to acquire the manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s notorious The 120 Days of Sodom, valued at €4.5m (£3.9m), for the National Library of France.

Related: ‘The most impure tale ever written’: how The 120 Days of Sodom became a ‘classic’

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Dead strange ... in search of Britain’s most unusual tombs

A travelogue of final resting places seeks to make readers confront their own mortality

The first night Jack Cooke slept in his hearse – stretched out on the wooden bench where a coffin would normally lie – he dreamed of his own funeral.

The 35-year-old had bought the second-hand body-carrier – all 18 foot and three tonnes of it – from an undertaker in Bristol. It was the ideal way, he believed, to embark on a road trip to discover Britain’s most unusual and forgotten tombs. “A hearse seemed like the perfect way to chase ghosts,” says Cooke.

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Unfinished manuscripts that lay behind Palestinian critic’s stated contempt for fiction

Scholar Edward Said longed to write novels, yet never succeeded, a new biography reveals

Edward Said was clear and firm: the work of a critic, he argued, is more important than the work of poets and novelists. It is public intellectuals, he believed, who are the writers most able to challenge power and change the world.

But according to a new biography of the highly respected Palestinian scholar and literary critic, Said secretly wrote both poetry and fiction – not even mentioning it to his friends.

Related: Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi review – good intentions turn to bitterness and isolation

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When Can I Go Back to School? Self-published lockdown story lands major publisher

‘Gentle, honest’ book, written by Anna Friend in response to her seven-year-old son’s worries, wins five-figure deal with Scholastic

A self-published children’s picture book that was written to help the author’s son deal with being kept home from school during lockdown has been snapped up by a major publisher for a five-figure sum.

Like many parents, theatre director Anna Friend found her son Billy, then seven, was struggling during the first lockdown, with his behaviour deteriorating rapidly. She and her husband had pulled Billy out of school just before the first lockdown in March 2020, because he had a cough. Then schools shut and he couldn’t return.

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A joy forever: poetry world prepares to mark bicentenary of John Keats

Two hundred years after his early death, plays, readings and new poetry will honour the legacy of the much beloved author

Almost 200 years ago, on 23 February 1821, the English poet John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at the age of 25. “I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave – thank God for the quiet grave,” he told his friend Joseph Severn, in whose arms he died. “I can feel the cold earth upon me – the daisies growing over me – O for this quiet – it will be my first.”

Keats gave instructions for his headstone to be engraved with the words “here lies one whose name was writ in water”, and visitors to Rome’s Protestant cemetery can still make a pilgrimage to see it today. But far from being “writ in water”, Keats’s words continue to echo, with a host of writing and events lined up to mark the 200th anniversary of his death.

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'Look after yourself my darling': letters salvaged from 1941 shipwreck

Archivists have painstakingly reconstructed the wartime missives recovered from the SS Gairsoppa, sunk by a U-boat off the Irish coast

The fragments of a 1941 love letter to a woman named Iris, found nearly three miles under the ocean in a shipwreck, have been painstakingly pieced together by experts, 80 years after it was posted.

“Look after yourself my darling, not only for your own sake …….. for mine also,” wrote the unknown serviceman stationed in the Waziristan region, now part of Pakistan. “Imagine that I have my lips tight against yours with my arms around you tight … let us hope that this bloody war will soon be over.”

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'Outstanding' Carnegie medal longlist includes three previous winners

Previous winners Elizabeth Acevedo, Patrick Ness and Ruta Sepetys up for prestigious children’s book award, with loss a common theme

An “outstanding” longlist for the UK’s most prestigious children’s books prize, the Carnegie medal, pits three former winners against each other – Elizabeth Acevedo, Patrick Ness and Ruta Sepetys.

This year’s 20-book longlist teems with novels exploring loss, grief and mental wellbeing. Acevedo’s novel in verse, Clap When You Land, follows two girls devastated by the death of their father. Manjeet Mann’s Run, Rebel, another verse novel, follows a girl trying to escape her claustrophobic home life. In, The Girl Who Became a Tree, by performance poet Joseph Coelho and illustrator Kate Milner, a girl tries to make sense of the loss of her father. In Jenny Downham’s Furious Thing, a 15-year-old girl deals with emotional abuse from her mother’s fiance. And in Danielle Jawando’s And The Stars Were Burning Brightly, a teenage boy’s world falls apart when his brother takes his own life.

Related: Jason Reynolds: 'Snoop Dogg once told white folks: 'I know you hate me. But your kids don't.' That's how I feel'

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Unseen work by Proust announced as ‘thunderclap’ by French publisher

The Seventy-Five Pages, out next month, contains germinal versions of episodes developed in In Search of Lost Time and opens ‘the primitive Proustian crypt’

For everyone who decided to bite the madeleine and read all 3,000-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time during lockdown, what’s one more book? French publisher Gallimard has announced that it will be releasing a never-before-published work by the great French writer: Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, or The Seventy-Five Pages, on 18 March.

The texts in The Seventy-Five Pages were written in 1908, around the time Proust began working on In Search of Lost Time, which was published between 1913 and 1927. The papers were part of a collection of documents held by the late publisher Bernard de Fallois, who died in 2018. During his lifetime, De Fallois oversaw the posthumous publication of several Proust works including Jean Santeuil, Proust’s abandoned first novel from the 1890s.

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'Quiet, CS Lewis is on': why subject of new film could be right for now

Norman Stone’s The Most Reluctant Convert follows author’s conversion from atheism to Christianity

Thirty-five years ago, Norman Stone won a Bafta for Shadowlands, a heart-wrenching drama about the life and love of CS Lewis, starring Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom. He also directed two dramatised documentaries on the Oxford scholar, an intellectual giant and one of the most influential writers of the 20th-century.

Now Stone has returned to Lewis with a new drama called The Most Reluctant Convert. Set before the 1950 publication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first of The Chronicles of Narnia series, the film focuses on the turmoil of Lewis’s emotional and intellectual journey from atheism to Christianity.

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Highwayman's 1750 confessions reveal ‘unusual’ ambivalence about gay sex

Rare pamphlet includes roistering criminal’s surprisingly enlightened attitude to the advances made to him by an innkeeper’s son

An “incredibly rare” deathbed confession from an 18th-century highwayman, written just before he was “hung in chains” for robbing the Yarmouth Mail and detailing his enlightened response to a failed gay seduction, has been acquired by Horsham Museum.

The Life of Thomas Munn, alias, the Gentleman Brick-Maker, alias, Tom the Smuggler runs to 24 pages and was printed in 1750. It is part of the once-popular genre of deathbed confessions, a precursor of true crime, and purports to be an autobiography handed by Munn to the Yarmouth gaoler on the morning of his execution on 6 April 1750.

I wanted Words to express my Confusion, Surprise and Passion, at his Propositions

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'Imperfect messenger' Bill Gates on what needs to change to avoid climate disaster

New book by Microsoft billionaire plays down impact of flying and driving and calls for focus on steel, meat and cement

The world is not lacking rich men with big ideas, Bill Gates has acknowledged. But having pumped $100m into Covid research, the Microsoft billionaire has turned to the climate emergency and the urgent need to slash carbon emissions to zero, undeterred by being a self-confessed “imperfect messenger” for the cause.

With a personal fortune of around $120bn, the world’s former richest man reveals in his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: the Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, that he has poured more than $1bn into innovative approaches to achieving carbon neutrality, investing in zero-carbon technologies and affordable and reliable clean energy.

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'A gift for Holocaust deniers': how Polish libel ruling will hit historians

The authors of a study on the fate of Polish Jews under Nazism have been told to apologise to a woman for defaming her uncle. The implications for future historical work are alarming

Poland’s nationalists have won their latest battle to defend the country’s wartime reputation. On Tuesday, the Warsaw district court ordered two leading historians to apologise to a woman for defaming a relative in their book about the Holocaust. The landmark ruling has serious implications for academic freedom and the future of Holocaust research, with historians around the world condemning the judgment.

“These are not matters to be adjudicated by courts, this is a point that can be discussed by scholars or interested readers in the exchange of opinions. In that sense, it’s really scandalous,” says Jan Tomasz Gross, whose seminal book Neighbours was a watershed in Poland’s public discussion of the Holocaust more than 20 years ago. “It’s part of a broad effort to stifle any inquiry and particularly the complicity of the local population in the persecution of Jews during that time.”

For the nationalists, this case is ammunition in their bid to intimidate anyone who dares to investigate the truth

Jo Glanville is editor of Looking for an Enemy: Eight Essays on Antisemitism, published by Short Books in May.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to publish memoir about her father's death

Notes on Grief will recount the life of ‘a remarkable man of kindness and charm’ and the author’s struggle to absorb his loss during lockdown last year

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a memoir about the sudden death of her father in lockdown last year. Notes on Grief, by the Orange prize-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, will be published on 11 May. Her UK publisher 4th Estate described it as “a timely and deeply personal … work of meditation, remembrance and hope”.

Adichie’s father, James Nwoye Adichie, died unexpectedly from complications of kidney failure last summer. He was in Nigeria, while his daughter was in the US. The author detailed his death, and her response to it, in an essay for the New Yorker in September, writing of how her four-year-old daughter re-enacts how she responded to the news: “She gets down on her knees to demonstrate, her small clenched fist rising and falling, and her mimicry makes me see myself as I was, utterly unravelling, screaming and pounding the floor.”

Related: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘America under Trump felt like a personal loss'

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Monique Roffey leads strong showing for indies on Rathbones Folio shortlist

The Costa winner is up for award honouring the best work of literature regardless of genre, alongside many other titles from small presses

Fresh from winning the Costa book of the year award and topping bestseller charts for the first time with a book for which she was forced to crowdfund her own publicity, Monique Roffey has been shortlisted for another major award: the £30,000 Rathbones Folio prize.

Roffey’s Costa-winning tale The Mermaid of Black Conch, about a centuries-old mermaid who falls in love with a fisher, is one of eight titles up for the Folio, which aims to reward the year’s best work of literature regardless of form. The Trinidadian-born British writer’s novel, draws on a legend from the Taino, an indigenous people of the Caribbean. This week, it was No 1 in the paperback fiction charts.

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Oscars release first shortlists for 2021 Academy Awards

Boys State, MLK/FBI and Crip Camp among contenders as categories announced include best documentary and best international film

Shortlists for nine Oscar categories have been unveiled by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas), an intermediate stage in the thinning-out of films that have qualified for consideration for the Academy Awards. The categories include best documentary, best international film and best song, as well as best live action and documentary shorts.

The rules for each voting process vary, but in most categories a preliminary vote from industry specialists in each field is employed to create the shortlist and then the final five nominations, with the full membership of the Academy invited to vote on the winner.

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Marvel removes antisemitic trope from Immortal Hulk comic

Panel showing character visiting ‘Jewery’ shop was an ‘honest but terrible mistake’, says artist Joe Bennett but the publisher has withdrawn the illustration

Marvel has removed antisemitic imagery from print and digital editions of the new issue of its Immortal Hulk comic after widespread condemnation.

The comic, published last week, was criticised after readers noticed that one panel featured the character Joe Fixit, in control of Bruce Banner’s body, stepping into a jewellery store. The name of the shop – “Cronemberg Jewery” – is seen in reverse on the window above a Star of David. The site ComicsXF said: “[The] only conceivable interpretation, to put it frankly, is that this is a visual play on the old and antisemitic trope of Jews running the diamond business.” It described the panel as “an incredibly overt antisemitic dogwhistle”.

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Jean-Claude Carrière, screenwriter of Cyrano de Bergerac and Belle de Jour, dies aged 89

Hailed as France’s finest screenwriter, Carrière won many awards in a six-decade movie career – and for the stage penned a memorable Mahabharata for Peter Brook

Celebrated French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who penned some of the most memorable movies of the past half-century, including The Tin Drum and Cyrano de Bergerac, has died at the age of 89. Carrière, best known for his work with Luis Buñuel and Miloš Forman, died in his sleep late Monday at his home in Paris, his daughter, Kiara Carrière, told AFP.

Related: Jean-Claude Carrière: 'If you want fame, don't be a screenwriter'

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Naomi Wolf accused of confusing child abuse with gay persecution in Outrages

Author’s history of Victorian ‘criminalisation of love’ was heavily criticised on publication in 2019. Now its new, revised edition is also under fire

Historians have accused Naomi Wolf of having confused evidence of sexual crimes against children and animals with the persecution of gay men in the Victorian era, in her controversial book Outrages.

Related: 'I don't feel humiliated': Naomi Wolf on historical inaccuracy controversy

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Reform business rates or risk a high street collapse, say firms

Tesco, B&Q and Waterstones join call for tax change to save thousands of retail jobs and shops

The leaders of household names including Tesco, B&Q and Waterstones have warned the chancellor that the business rates burden on shops is putting thousands of high street jobs at risk, and called for online retailers to pay their “fair share” of tax.

In a letter to Rishi Sunak before next month’s budget, the chief executives of 18 retail and property organisations, representing more than a million employees and tens of thousands of shops, say failing to overhaul the commercial equivalent of council tax will hamper the ability of high streets and town centres to recover from the pandemic.

What’s the problem?

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Backlash as Wallace Collection considers closing library to public

More than 10,000 people have signed petition against proposal, which is currently at consultation stage at the museum bequeathed to the nation

More than 10,000 people have signed a petition calling on the management of London’s historic Wallace Collection to reject proposals to close its library and archive to the public.

The active petition was launched by archivists and trade unionists working with staff at the Wallace Collection, in response to senior management’s decision to put the closure to an internal consultation, which ends on 11 February. The petition claims that management wants to focus on “income generation”, and they do not “view the library and archive as part of this”. If the library is closed to the public, two staff members would be made redundant.

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Hunter Biden memoir about drug addiction to be published

Son of US president, and ongoing target for conservatives, will release Beautiful Things in April

Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden and an ongoing target for Republican supporters, has announced that his memoir, Beautiful Things, will be published in April.

Related: Joe, Jill and the Bidens: who are America's new first family?

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Waterstones says paying furloughed staff minimum wage 'would not be prudent'

Book chain says it is ‘sympathetic’ to petition signed by more than 100 staff in support of employees facing acute uncertainty on scheme

Waterstones has told staff that furloughed workers will not receive any increase to their wages until shops can reopen, after a petition was launched calling on the book chain to help workers who are being paid below minimum wage on the scheme.

A petition signed by more than 1,500 people so far, including more than 100 Waterstones workers and backed by names including author Philip Pullman, has been published on Organise. Addressed to Waterstones managing director James Daunt and chief operating officer Kate Skipper, it says that the majority of Waterstones staff are employed either on or very close to the minimum wage, and that upon being furloughed, they find themselves “plunged beneath this line and into financial uncertainty”.

Related: Book sales defy pandemic to hit eight-year high

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Waterstones says paying furloughed staff minimum wage 'would not be prudent'

Book chain says it is ‘sympathetic’ to petition signed by more than 100 staff in support of employees facing acute uncertainty on scheme

Waterstones has told staff that furloughed workers will not receive any increase to their wages until shops can reopen, after a petition was launched calling on the book chain to help workers who are being paid below minimum wage on the scheme.

A petition on Organise signed by more than 1,500 people, including more than 100 Waterstones workers and backed by names including author Philip Pullman, has been sent to Waterstones managing director James Daunt, and chief operating officer Kate Skipper. It says that the majority of Waterstones staff are employed either on or very close to the minimum wage, and that upon being furloughed, they find themselves “plunged beneath this line and into financial uncertainty”.

Related: Book sales defy pandemic to hit eight-year high

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Birmingham library brings Shakespeare to life in dozens of languages

The largest Shakespeare collection in a public library is launching Everything to Everybody, with films and readings in most of the city’s 93 languages

It is a little-known fact that Birmingham is home to the largest Shakespeare collection in any public library in the world.

Created in 1864 to celebrate the playwright’s 300th birthday, it was the world’s first great Shakespeare collection and once held such standing that the Soviet government deposited 300 items in the collection during the depths of the cold war.

Everything is Everybody is available online here.

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National Library of Wales to receive £2.25m rescue package after protests

Welsh government had said it could not extend funding, but following pressure from campaigners has announced sum ‘to safeguard jobs and deliver strategic priorities’

The Welsh government has announced a £2.25m rescue package for the National Library of Wales after Philip Pullman joined a campaign warning that it was under threat.

A government-commissioned review last September had found that the library’s income reduced by 40% between 2007 and 2019, with staff numbers down 23%, to 224. The review recommended that “urgent attention” be given to the library’s financial needs.

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US magazine Poetry faces outcry for publishing work by sex offender

New issue, dedicated to work by current and former prisoners, provokes uproar after it emerges one poet has served time for child pornography offences

The US’s prestigious Poetry magazine has doubled down on its decision to publish a poem by a convicted sex offender as part of a special edition dedicated to incarcerated poets, telling critics that “it is not our role to further judge or punish [people] as a result of their criminal convictions”.

The magazine, which has been running since 1912 and is published by the Poetry Foundation, has just released its new issue focusing on work by “currently and formerly incarcerated people”, their families and prison workers. It includes a poem by Kirk Nesset, a former professor of English literature who was released from prison last year after serving time for possessing, receiving and distributing child sexual abuse images in 2014. The investigation found Nesset in possession of more than half a million images and films of child sexual abuse.

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Fears rise that Polish libel trial could threaten future Holocaust research

Case brought in wake of rightwing government criminalising blame of Polish nation for Nazi crimes could have implications for further research

Two Polish historians are facing a libel trial over a book examining Poles’ behaviour during the second world war, a case whose outcome is expected to determine the future of independent Holocaust research under Poland’s nationalist government.

A verdict is expected in Warsaw’s district court on 9 February in the case against Barbara Engelking, a historian with the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, and Jan Grabowski, a professor of history at the University of Ottawa. While the case is a libel trial, it comes in the wake of a 2018 law that makes it a crime to falsely accuse the Polish nation of crimes committed by Nazi Germany. The law caused a major diplomatic spat with Israel.

Related: Poland can’t lay its Holocaust ghosts to rest by censoring free speech | Jonathan Freedland

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Mariah Carey sued by sister Alison for 'emotional distress' arising from memoir

Alison Carey describes Mariah as ‘heartless, vicious’ in lawsuit following pop star’s publication of The Meaning of Mariah Carey in 2020

Mariah Carey is being sued by her older sister for “emotional distress” stemming from the singer’s 2020 memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey.

Alison Carey’s lawsuit was filed with the New York County supreme court last Monday, and calls for at least $1.25m (£1.1m) in damages. Alison accuses Mariah of “heartless, vicious, vindictive, despicable and totally unnecessary public humiliation” via the book.

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Hal Holbrook, Deep Throat in All the President's Men, dies aged 95

Distinguished actor was also famed for portraying American icons Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, and had long career in film and TV

Hal Holbrook, an award-winning actor acclaimed for his one-man portrayal of American literary legend Mark Twain and whose film work included portraying the mysterious Deep Throat in All the President’s Men, has died at the age of 95.

Holbrook died on 23 January at his home in Beverly Hills, California, the New York Times reported. His death was confirmed late on Monday by his assistant, Joyce Cohen.

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Dante's descendant seeks to overturn poet's 1302 corruption conviction

Seven centuries after the poet was found guilty in Florence, Sperello di Serego Alighieri has begun a campaign to clear his ancestor’s name

The reputation of Dante Alighieri needs little burnishing: his Divine Comedy, tracing the poet’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, is widely regarded as one of the greatest works ever written. But more than 700 years after Dante was accused of corruption and condemned to be burned to death, his descendant is looking to clear his name.

Sperello di Serego Alighieri, an astrophysicist, and the law professor Alessandro Traversi are working to see if Dante’s 1302 sentencing for corruption in political office can be reversed.

Related: The Guardian view on Dante: heavenly wisdom for our troubled times | Editorial

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Laura Jean McKay wins $100,000 Victorian literature prize for The Animals in That Country

Eerily set in a world gripped by pandemic, the debut was partially written by voice-to-text technology as the author recovered from her own strange disease

A first-time novelist has collected Australia’s richest literary prize with her apocalyptic and eerily-timed tale about a world in the throes of a pandemic.

Dr Laura Jean McKay took out the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature on Monday for The Animals in That Country, a debut novel described by Guardian reviewer Justine Jordan as a fierce and funny exploration of other consciousnesses, and the limits of language.

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