Vanessa’s a pillar of the hiking community | Brief letters

Your report (Campaigners seek listed status for historic trig points that mapped Britain, 16 April) didn’t mention the Vanessa trig point – Vanessa being a corruption of the Venesta company, which made cardboard tubes into which the concrete for the pillars was poured. These were designed for less accessible places, mostly in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. I was never less than half exhausted when I met one.Margaret SquiresSt Andrews, FifeThe Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link

Zoologist, author and presenter Desmond Morris dies aged 98

The zoologist Desmond Morris, perhaps best known for his book The Naked Ape and his work on the ITV programme Zoo Time, has died aged 98.Morris’s son Jason paid tribute to him after his death on Sunday, praising his many professional achievements as well as his role as a father and grandfather.“His was a lifetime of exploration, curiosity and creativity,” Jason said. “A zoologist, manwatcher, author and artist, he was still writing and painting right up until his death. He was a great man and an even better father and grandfather

V&A East Storehouse and Norwich Castle among finalists for museum of the year

The V&A East Storehouse, the National Gallery and an accessible castle in Norwich are among the contenders for this year’s Art Fund museum of the year award, the most prestigious UK prize in the sector.The annual prize offers the winner £120,000, with £20,000 going to each of the other finalists, who the Art Fund’s director, Jenny Waldman, said had all “innovated in different ways”.This year’s list is dominated by some of the biggest names in the cultural sector that have undergone big refurbishments or invested in significant new outposts, such as the V&A’s East Storehouse, which will be seen by many as a frontrunner.Based in the Olympic Park in Stratford, east London, the space aims to reimagine what a storeroom can be, with partitions removed so visitors can see “and breathe the same air” as the objects. Waldman said the V&A Storehouse, which opened in spring 2025 at a cost of £65m, had broken the boundaries of what a store could be

Letter: Sir Neil Cossons obituary

In 1971, Neil Cossons and I were on the staff of Liverpool Museum, and he invited me to accompany him on a visit to Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire. We admired Blists Hill furnace, the bridge, the surrounding buildings and their setting, and shortly afterwards he became its director.The appeal it had as a monument to the industrial revolution lay in it being a complete entity. Many other site-based museums rely on translocating buildings, often into a replicated local landscape. History occurs in places, and Neil knew that raising one’s gaze from the built artefacts to the landscape enables understanding: preserving the place was crucial

‘Women want to experience pleasure’: how the female gaze caught the attention of film, TV and fiction

From passionate romantasy novels to premium television dramas, culture is bringing the agency, desires and interior lives of women to the fore. It’s proving good for business, but is this a permanent revolution?Do you voraciously read the pages of steamy romantasy bestsellers by Sarah J Maas or Rebecca Yarros? Or flood your group chat with breathless recaps of the latest goings-on in TV series such as Heated Rivalry or Bridgerton? Or even immerse yourself in the divisive and challenging cinematic worlds of Emerald Fennell? If so, you surely can’t have failed to notice that in pop culture, the female gaze – storytelling that highlights the meandering, textured, sublimely messy inner worlds and wants of women – is enjoying an explosion.On TV, you can see it everywhere, in the interior lives and desires taken up by Big Little Lies, Sirens or Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington’s Little Fires Everywhere. Romantasy harbours it in the shape of powerful maidens and sex in fae (fairy) realms, while Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and Promising Young Woman are marketed with the promise of converting women’s experiences into dark beauty on the big screen.A shift, a moment or a commercial juggernaut? That depends how deeply you look

Yann Martel: ‘I hate the rich people of this world – of which I’m one, because of Life of Pi’

Your novels Life of Pi, Beatrice and Virgil, and The High Mountains of Portugal all feature animals in starring roles. If you could be any animal, which would it be, and why?A sloth, because it has a peaceful, long life. Or maybe a koala. They both look like stoners. A sloth just hangs there in its tree, it sleeps 22 hours a day – or maybe it’s meditating

Kae Tempest on creativity and his gender transition: ‘I’m just glad to be alive’

Kae Tempest sidles into a pub near his house on a weekday afternoon and orders a pint of mineral water. At his side is Murphy, an enormous, 14-year-old alaskan malamute dog with startling blue eyes who settles down on the floor next to his master and goes to sleep. “He’s all right,” Tempest says. “He’s very friendly. He won’t even put his nose up

Winners and judges out of pocket as £20,000 writing awards appear to have closed

A competition for new writers that promised a £20,000 prize fund appears to have shut down, leaving winners and judges, including a Booker prize-winning novelist, out of pocket.Established in 2022, the Plaza Prizes last year offered 10 awards that were judged by the “finest poets and writers in the world”.However, some of the judges for the 2025 competition say they were not paid, and a number of winners say they had their entries withdrawn after being accused of using AI to create their work – allegations they strenuously denied.One judge, the 2021 Booker prize winner Damon Galgut, described the competition as a “scam” after he did not get paid for his work judging a fiction section of the annual competition.Anthony Joseph, who won the 2022 TS Eliot poetry prize, also says he was not paid for his work

Zelda taught me the importance of play – and has helped me deal with work, parenting and grief

I initially dismissed the Wind Waker’s cartoonish visuals as juvenile. But now I try to carry the game’s sense of joy into all aspects of my lifeI had a complicated relationship with video games when I was a teenager. I had straightforwardly, wholeheartedly loved the Nintendo games that I’d grown up with, tumbling around primary-coloured dreamscapes in Super Mario 64 and having the time of my life. But as I grew into a pretentious young adult in the early 00s, I started to want more from games, and I wasn’t finding it. So many of them were mindless, or juvenile, or needlessly violent