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”.

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

Egyptian’s calculated outburst is a challenge to management and their support for embattled Arne Slot

Mohamed Salah’s relationship with Liverpool is broken. That is abundantly clear after the incendiary interview at Elland Road on Saturday night that also poses a test of the club’s relationship with Arne Slot. The next revelation will be the extent of internal support for the coach who delivered Liverpool’s record-equalling 20th league title eight months ago.

Salah may have been emotional having been on the bench for the third successive game, but stunning waiting reporters not only by stopping to speak but by dropping a series of grenades during a post-match interview lasting more than seven minutes was not a case of heart ruling head. It never is when one of the greatest players to pull on the red shirt deigns to address the media. Whether it is criticism of contract negotiations, applying a little more pressure to get an agreeable deal done or, in this instance, piling more problems on Slot, Salah’s words are calculated to achieve what he wants.

Thankfully, we now know more about conditions such as autism and ADHD. The health secretary must not be part of this attempt to turn back the clock

Wes Streeting is a politician whose keen interest in the zeitgeist is only matched by his seeming drive to be as close to the heart of it as possible. It is, therefore, not much of a surprise that the secretary of state for health and social care should end the year by announcing what the official blurb calls an “independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism”. Many of the resulting headlines put it more pithily: in keeping with an increasingly deafening media din, this will seemingly be an investigation into “overdiagnosis”.

Candidates for 2025’s word of the year have so far included “rage bait” and “parasocial”, but overdiagnosis is surely the term that perfectly captures the intellectual and political fashions of the past 12 months. The mess of ideas it crystallises now has a set text, published back in March: The Age Of Diagnosis by the neurologist and epilepsy expert Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan. Having been pronounced on, with his usual belligerent ignorance, by Nigel Farage, overdiagnosis has become an obsession of the Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice, who now holds forth about why some children with special educational needs shouldn’t be entitled to dedicated school transport, and claims that the sight of kids with sensory issues wearing ear defenders at school is “insane”.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist. His book Maybe I’m Amazed: A Story of Love and Connection in Ten Songs is available from the Guardian bookshop

From digging trenches and building walls, to learning survival skills, Poland is increasingly aware of risks posed by its eastern neighbours

Cezary Pruszko still remembers the civil defence training of his Communist-era schooldays – map reading, survival skills, and a sense that the danger of war was real and ever present.

“My generation grew up with those threats. You didn’t have to explain why this mattered,” said the 60-year-old Pruszko, as he refreshed those skills at an army base outside Warsaw on a recent frosty Saturday morning. With dozens of other Polish civilians, he toured a bomb shelter, fitted gas masks and practised striking sparks from a flint to start a fire.

Parcels worth £666.5m have been stolen in the UK this year, though some pranksters have found ways to give culprits their comeuppance. With Christmas deliveries arriving thick and fast, here are practical steps to take

A couple of years ago, 31-year-old charity worker Nicki Wedgwood had ordered Christmas presents online for friends and family. When the packages were delivered to her in Hackney, east London, the driver left them in the lobby of her building rather than taking them directly to her flat. She spotted them as she popped out to a nearby shop and decided to pick them up when she came back. When she returned 10 minutes later, the boxes had been ripped open and their contents were gone.

Wedgwood thinks she passed the thief in the hallway as she was leaving for the shop. “There was some random dude just inside the doorway, who had a Boris bike with him,” she says. She had assumed he was a guest of one of her neighbours. “I said hello to him … I think he even said Merry Christmas.”

Exclusive: Watchdog finds 14% of cases not put on hospital waiting lists, with many reporting worsening health and rising anxiety

One in seven people in England who need hospital care are not receiving it because their GP referral is lost, rejected or delayed, the NHS’s patient watchdog has found.

Three-quarters (75%) of those trapped in this “referrals black hole” suffer harm to their physical or mental health as a result of not being added to the waiting list for tests or treatment.

Ukraine’s president set to meet the leaders of the UK, France and Germany in London on Monday

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Donald Trump has said Volodymyr Zelenskyy “isn’t ready” to sign off on a US-authored peace proposal aimed at ending the war between Russia and Ukraine, at the end of three days of talks between Washington and Kyiv in Florida.

“I’m a little bit disappointed that President Zelenskyy hasn’t yet read the proposal, that was as of a few hours ago. His people love it, but he hasn’t,” Trump claimed as he spoke with reporters on Sunday night.

Home Office drive to stop small boats crossing Channel is handing more power to people smugglers, report finds

The UK’s policy to stop asylum seekers from crossing the Channel in small boats has led to an increase in violence, deaths and smuggler control, but has not deterred arrivals, according to a report by human rights organisations.

The 176-page report from Humans for Rights Network, includes contributions from 17 refugee and human rights organisations operating in northern France and six in the UK.

Fifteen organisations sign letter expressing deep concern over EHRC guidance being considered by ministers

New rules on access to single-sex spaces could pose a significant risk to the mental health of trans and non-binary people, according to 15 of the UK’s most respected mental charities.

Organisations including Samaritans, Mind, Centre for Mental Health and the Royal College of Psychiatrists have written to the equalities minister, Bridget Phillipson, to express their “deep concern” about guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) that is awaiting approval from the government.