The follow-up to Trainspotting sees Renton, Begbie and co settling down. The bestselling author explains why now is the perfect time for romance

I was born in the great port of Leith. Stories are in my blood; listening to them, telling them. My family were typical of many in the area, moving from tenement to council scheme, increasingly further down the Forth estuary. I was brought up in a close community. I left school with practically no qualifications. I tended towards the interesting kids, the troublemakers. All my own fault. I was always encouraged to be more scholarly by my parents, who valued education. But I left school and became an apprentice technician, doing a City & Guilds course. I hated it. I was always a writer: I just didn’t know it. I cite being crap at everything else in evidence.

It’s why I’ve never stopped writing stories about my youth and my go-to gang of characters from Trainspotting. Their reaction to events and changes in the world helps inform my own. They’ve been given substance by people I’ve met down the decades, from Leith pubs to Ibiza clubs.

A teacher in London and a student in Margate had differing views on feminism and intimacy outside of marriage – could they find some common ground over sex workers?

Jo, 38, London

Occupation Teacher

With the UK still shaking off the psychological side-effects of Covid, Rachel Reeves might want to broaden her aims

Every parent who battled their way through home schooling during the long months of lockdown, and every vulnerable person forced to shield themselves away, can have had little doubt that the Covid pandemic was an unhappy time.

But research by the non-profit consultancy Pro Bono Economics (PBE), suggests that the nation’s wellbeing has never fully recovered from the plunge it took in mid-2020.

A year ago the image of Trump’s raised fist became a political touchstone, helping force Joe Biden from the race and fuelling a presidency like no other

Blake Marnell was standing in the front row, about 10 yards from Donald Trump, when the shots rang out. He watched the Secret Service pile on the former US president. “I was able to see him standing and I could see the blood on his ear,” Marnell recalls. “When he put his fist up, I remember yelling, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’”

Sunday marks one year since the assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and a week that changed US politics. Eight days later then-president Joe Biden, 81, dropped out of the election race amid concerns over his mental and physical decline.

From photo-editing apps to ‘Instagram face’, technology has radically altered the way we see ourselves. Ahead of a new exhibition at Somerset House, our critic considers the meaning of art in a digital age

It’s the artist Qualeasha Wood who tells me about Snapchat dysmorphia, “a term coined by plastic surgeons who noticed there was a shift in the mid 2010s when people started bringing in their AI-beautified portraits instead of a celebrity picture”. To resolve your Snapchat dysmorphia, you get your real face remodelled to look like the ideal version of you that artificial intelligence has perfected on your phone screen.

There is a fundamental problem with this, says Adam Lowe, whose Factum Foundation in Madrid is at the forefront of art and technology, digitally documenting artworks and cultural heritage sites around the world. When you have surgery to look like your best self as shown on a flat screen, the results in three-dimensional reality can be very odd indeed. You can feel Lowe’s sadness at the way plastic surgery botches human restoration in pursuit of screen perfection: “I have to look away,” he says.

The curators of shattered historical buildings near the eastern frontline are preserving wartime memories as they reconstruct their collections

The museum of local history in the eastern Ukrainian town of Izium has, like the community around it, endured much since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country.

When Izium was bitterly fought over in early 2022 at the start of the Russian assault, the 19th-century building suffered two direct hits from missiles that blew out the roof and led to flood damage. Under occupation from March to September 2022, a Russian guard was posted on the door – but invaders never transported its collection any deeper behind Russian lines, or found the rare early 18th-century volume of the gospels – one of only three of its type – that museum workers had spirited away and hidden.

Treasury chief secretary says he wants to emulate New Labour support for community groups that changed his life

Darren Jones has spent much of the past few months doing the traditional, hard-nosed job of a Treasury chief secretary – fighting line-by-line budget battles with ministers. But with last month’s fraught spending review over, he has turned his attention to an issue closer to his heart for his latest policy.

“The council estate I grew up on was one of the neighbourhoods that was picked by the New Labour government because it was so deprived, essentially, in terms of income and educational outcomes,” he says.

Emergency services at the scene after Beechcraft B200 aircraft involved in collision at about 4pm on Sunday

A small passenger plane has crashed after taking off in Essex.

The Beechcraft B200 aircraft crashed at around 4pm on Sunday, soon after taking off from Southend airport, and was seen in flames with dark smoke billowing from it, according to photos circulating on social media.

Legislation would compel employers of more than 250 workers to reveal disability and ethnicity pay gaps

Ministers have been urged to pass legislation that would protect whistleblowers who expose employers who flout forthcoming UK diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) laws.

The equality (race and disability) bill, which the equalities minister Seema Malhotra has described as part of the government’s “absolute” commitment to DEI, is expected to be published this year.

• Updates from SW19 as top two seeds meet in final

• Mail Daniel | Preview: Sinner seeks Paris revenge

“Fritz was asked to compare the two after the semi-final,” writes Kerrith Britland. “He said something along the lines of Sinner is more predictable but a more consistently big ball striker, while Alcaraz has more access to angles but can go massive too.

While I think the RG loss would’ve been tough to swallow for Sinner, I don’t think he expected to do as well as he did after the three months out and against Alcaraz on his favoured surface. I reckon he wants this one bad though. With that Dimitrov bullet dodged, Sinner might think the powers that be are on his side today.