Heritage coalition saves Scottish modernist ‘jewel’ in fiercely fought auction

A coalition of design and conservation charities has won an auction to buy a threatened modernist building in the Scottish Borders after a fiercely contested bidding battle.The group, headed by the National Trust for Scotland, paid a final hammer price of £279,000 for the Bernat Klein Studio near Selkirk in an online auction on Wednesday morning. The final price of the property, which has lain unused and derelict for more than 20 years, could be in the region of £336,000.The building, regarded by conservators as a jewel of late-modernist British architecture, was designed by the highly regarded architect Peter Womersley in 1972. It was created for the textile designer Bernat Klein, whose clients included Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent

The ‘Black Sundance’ honoring film-makers of color and focusing on community building

The voice of the writer Toni Cade Bambara overlays a montage of archival film and photographs of Black people at school and work in a new feature documentary about her life. “The Reconstruction era offers a window into the 1930s,” Bambara says in the film. “There is the same drive for land, for the vote, for labor rights, education. The same need for self-help enterprises, for group cooperation.”So begins TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, the biographical film about the Black author, documentarian and social activist whose work on Black liberation and feminism helped inspire 20th-century social justice movements

Jon Stewart on Trump’s Epstein scandal: ‘How do you expect the media to move on, when Trump has such a hard time doing so?’

Late-night hosts followed Donald Trump and his Jeffrey Epstein scandal to Scotland, where he found new ways to put his foot in his mouth.Donald Trump headed to Scotland this week, nominally to work on a trade deal with the European Union, but also to put “an ocean’s distance between himself and the Epstein scandal”, said Jon Stewart on Monday’s Daily Show.But “how do you expect the media to move on, when Trump has such a hard time doing so?” he wondered.Stewart played a clip of a Scottish reporter asking Trump, “Mr President, was part of the rush to get this deal done to knock the Jeffrey Epstein story out?”“He’s all like, ‘How did you even hear about … I thought you guys just got Baywatch like three months ago?’” Stewart laughed. “‘Doesn’t anybody here have a question about this trade deal sinking both of our economies with tariffs?’”In response to the question, Trump offered what Stewart called his “13 Reasons Why I’m Not Involved with a Pedophile”

By the 30s, Katharine Hepburn was box office poison. Then she made The Philadelphia Story

As a stuck-up socialite tangled in a love triangle, Hepburn delivers one of the most memorable screwball heroines – and we can’t help but love herThese days, Katharine Hepburn is revered as a progressive icon of Hollywood’s golden age, an androgynous (and possibly queer) fashion rebel whose four best actress awards have yet to be topped at the Oscars. But back in 1938, only six years into her illustrious career, she was branded as “box office poison”.She was a star ahead of her time, her domineering screen presence registering as shrill and petulant by the tail end of the 1930s. After the box office disappointments of Bringing up Baby and Holiday – both now canonised romcom classics – she retreated from Hollywood and signed on to a new play penned by her friend Philip Barry: The Philadelphia Story.Like its film adaptation, Barry’s script centres on Tracy Lord, a stuck-up socialite (easily read as a stand-in for Hepburn herself) set to marry a wealthy politician, only for the wedding to be upended by the arrival of two competing romantic prospects: her ex-husband, CK Dexter Haven, and tabloid reporter Mike Connor

The joy of railways is shared by millions | Letters

Although a not a full-on Thomas the Tank Engine fan, I have for 65 years been an out-there and unashamed enthusiast for anything running on rails (‘Thomas the Tank Engine clung to me like a disease’: the film about the choo-choo’s global grownup superfans, 22 July).My wife and I sometimes do front-of-house at a heritage railway and can confirm the attraction of railways for those with autism, particularly young people. There is a predictability about railways, timetables, signals and all the other paraphernalia that is very attractive.Also, there is endless scope for studying minutiae and collecting odd bits of information. Numbers and names on the engines, liveries (colours of trains to you), performance records and endless other statistics

Hulk Hogan obituary

Hulk Hogan, who has died of a cardiac arrest aged 71, was the most famous personality in the world of wrestling, a flamboyant figure whose deep tan, blond horseshoe moustache, bright bandanas and heavily muscled body were known across the globe, even to those who had little interest in the sport.As the most recognisable face of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in the US, Hogan helped to build what had initially been a fairly parochial brand into a hugely lucrative phenomenon, watched on television by millions.Though the wrestling was all fakery, Hogan held the WWF’s title belt a number of times across those boom years, including over a four-year stretch in the mid-1980s. Thereafter he largely maintained his dominance, while switching between the WWF and various other competitions over the next two decades.During a typical bout he would soak up blow after blow from his opponent until defeat seemed inevitable, only to suddenly snap into a fury that would turn the encounter around, often finishing things off with a trademark leg drop by bouncing off the rope, leaping into the air and then landing, leg first, on to his foe