The collected poems of Sylvia Plath are full of ‘neurosis, insanity, disease, death, horror, terror’. They are blackly, bleakly brilliant

It will soon be 30 years since the Bank of England took full control of monetary policy, but as inflationary pressures storm its barricades, something may give

The Conservative Party leader is confident despite gloomy projections for this week’s local elections — and, for Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage, it’s fighting talk

After President Trump took offence at Friedrich Merz’s Iran war comments, Donald Tusk warned that infighting was a bigger threat to Nato than its external enemies

Officers lack knowledge of Chinese organised crime, allowing offenders running prostitution rings and smuggling drugs to evade arrest, a study has found

‘Vultures’ are circling before the local elections but the prime minister would fight any challenge by Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting or Andy Burnham

The head of the Metropolitan Police says social media is fuelling an ‘epidemic’ of antisemitism that policing alone cannot solve

More boats and engines are being seized and routes are being blocked off amid better co-operation across the Continent

The American president appeared to back the SNP leader after Labour also claimed credit for the end of the US’s levy during the King’s visit this week

A drop in healthy life expectancy means you’d better get saving if you want to fulfil those retirement dreams

Steve Reed, the housing secretary, accepts that the local elections will be bad but believes infighting will make the party irrelevant to the electorate

Green Party seems happy to tolerate antisemitism, Muslim sectarianism and Corbynites — it’s wholly unfit for power

The Green party leader was accused of fuelling ‘rising tensions’ by sharing a post about police ‘violently kicking’ the man in Golders Green

Father Ted co-creator says the case should never have reached court and accused the police of taking the side of campaigners

The Times has obtained documents that provide fresh insights into Aidan and Howard Barclay’s personal finances as HSBC pursued them for £140m of debt

This debut by 26-year-old Albertine Clarke is a surreal black comedy about a young woman whose dad runs off to become a bodybuilder

Israeli police arrest a 36-year-old after CCTV footage showed a nun from the French School of Biblical and Archaeological Research being shoved and kicked on Mount Zion

The president made the concession to mark the end of the monarch’s trip with Camilla, saying ‘they got me to do something that nobody else was able to do’

Labour MPs think the members will back Sir Keir Starmer’s former deputy for the leadership — and are rallying to find alternatives

Mayors say the Chinese-made machines have become a two-wheeled menace causing fear and injury in their streets

Cash injection from Australia would offer potential for growth but also raise ‘feeder league’ fears. What opportunities and challenges lie ahead?

Maxim Tucker investigates a new form of warfare after soldiers were fooled by a team of hackers posing as cybercriminals

Police officers were injured in the violence in Northern Ireland celebrated by Matthew Lee McCandless, who plans to hold a procession through Stonehaven

Anne Hathaway and co return to the hit 2006 film. It’s not groundbreaking but there’s warmth beneath the designer gloss and jaunty celebrity cameos

Victor Riparbelli says it’s OK to experiment with large language models but that they should ‘make us more concise, nor more verbose’

The president insists that his naval blockade will make Tehran capitulate. But the calculations look different on the other side

Vera Brandes was the teenager who staged Keith Jarrett’s record-breaking 1975 Cologne gig. As the story is turned into a film, she explains what really happened

Although 92 peers lost their seats in the House of Lords on Wednesday, the prime minister has reinstituted about 26. They may have to take new titles

The Green Party leader reshared a post condemning officers alleged to have ‘repeatedly and violently’ kicked the man accused of stabbing two Jewish men

A year after losing her mother to Alzheimer’s, Professor Tanya Byron found solace in St Barts

Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, angered the president by saying the US had been ‘humiliated’ by Iran’s leadership

Police believe they were responsible for about 40 per cent of mobile phone theft in London but operated across the country and in major international cities

Vape shops, barbers and takeaways are suspected of black market trading, counterfeiting and money laundering in two ‘corridors or crime’ identified by researchers

UK’s biggest winemaker on track to achieve its ambition of capturing 1 per cent of the global champagne market by 2035

Britain’s biggest pharmaceuticals company suspended projects last September but has welcomed government decision to raise medicine prices

Scientists have predicted the cosmos could meet its fate in just 19.5 billion years’ time, collapsing inwards to a single point in a ‘Big Crunch’

The last Trabant rolled off the production line in 1991, but safaris in Berlin and Dresden have turned the ‘smelly little cars’ into vehicles for nostalgia

A Russian-speaking contact allegedly offered payment to set fire to a car and two houses linked to the prime minister, the Old Bailey heard

Allies of the former deputy prime minister are urging her to ‘take advantage’ of the unprecedented losses predicted for Sir Keir Starmer next month

Mothin Ali speaks out over dismissal of local election candidates accused of antisemitism

The former Formula 1 driver is accused of carrying out works that differ from approved plans for his 85-acre Scottish estate in Twynholm, Kirkcudbrightshire

Frozen thresholds and the generosity of the triple lock guarantee on state pensions has pushed up the number of over-66s who have to pay tax

A man, who was ‘armed with a knife’, was tasered by police in Golders Green in what has been declared a terrorist incident

The monarch offered an olive branch to President Trump on defence spending in an address punctuated by applause from across the political divide

Club’s struggles in Top 14 — and Grenoble’s heartbreak at missing out on promotion — have prompted debate on merits of supposedly non-negotiable tradition

Plus: feline influence on the Commons; Morgan McSweeney’s phone mystery deepens; too many Trumps to follow on TV; and Graham Norton’s rules for flying

We will not recapture the glory years of UK-US alliance but we can move on to a strong and more mature next chapter

Americans have persuaded themselves that the right to bear arms will keep them safe. It does exactly the opposite

The mid-century revolution in academia made institutions a shining symbol of social mobility but that is now in reverse

President raises spectre of renewed US strikes and tells leadership that ‘they better get smart soon!’