A Traitors cloak, Britpop Trumps and a very arty swearbox: it’s the 2025 Culture Christmas gift guide!

Put some artful oomph into your festive season with our bumper guide, featuring everything from a satanic South Park shirt to Marina Abramović’s penis salt and pepper potsThe Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.Is there an overly sweary person in your life? Do you have a friend who’s utterly bereft without The Traitors? Would anyone you know like to shake up their cocktail-making? And do you ever wish your neighbours’ doormat was, well, a bit more kinky?The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link

Comedian Judi Love: ‘I’m a big girl, the boss, and you love it’

Judi Love was 17 when she was kidnapped, though she adds a couple of years on when reliving it on stage. It was only the anecdote’s second to-audience outing when I watched her recite it, peppered with punchlines, at a late-October work-in-progress gig. The bones of her new show – All About the Love, embarking on a 23-date tour next year – are very much still evolving, but this Wednesday night in Bedford is a sell out, such is the pull of Love’s telly star power.She starts by twerking her way into the spotlight, before riffing on her career as a social worker and trading “chicken and chips for champagne and ceviche”. Interspersed are opening bouts of sharp crowd work – Love at her free-wheeling best

Fran Lebowitz: ‘Hiking is the most stupid thing I could ever imagine’

I would like to ask your opinion on five things. First of all, leaf blowers.A horrible, horrible invention. I didn’t even know about them until like 20 years ago when I rented a house in the country. I was shocked! I live in New York City, we don’t have leaf problems

​The Guide #219: Don’t panic! Revisiting the millennium’s wildest cultural predictions

I love revisiting articles from around the turn of the millennium, a fascinatingly febrile period when everyone – but journalists especially – briefly lost the run of themselves. It seems strange now to think that the ticking over of a clock from 23:59 to 00:00 would prompt such big feelings, of excitement, terror, of end-of-days abandon, but it really did (I can remember feeling them myself as a teenager, especially the end-of-days-abandon bit.)Of course, some of that feeling came from the ticking over of the clock itself: the fears over the Y2K bug might seem quite silly today, but its potential ramifications – planes falling out of the sky, power grids failing, entire life savings being deleted in a stroke – would have sent anyone a bit loopy. There’s a very good podcast, Surviving Y2K, about some of the people who responded particularly drastically to the bug’s threat, including a bloke who planned to sit out the apocalypse by farming and eating hamsters.It does seem funny – and fitting – in the UK, column inches about this existential threat were equalled, perhaps even outmatched, by those about a big tarpaulin in Greenwich

From Christy to Neil Young: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

ChristyOut now Based on the life of the American boxer Christy Martin (nickname: the Coal Miner’s Daughter), this sports drama sees Sydney Sweeney Set aside her conventionally feminine America’s sweetheart aesthetic and don the mouth guard and gloves of a professional fighter.Blue MoonOut now Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise) reteams with one of his favourite actors, Ethan Hawke, for a film about Lorenz Hart, the songwriter who – in addition to My Funny Valentine and The Lady Is a Tramp – also penned the lyrics to the eponymous lunar classic. Also starring Andrew Scott and Margaret Qualley.PillionOut now Harry Melling plays the naive sub to Alexander Skarsgård’s biker dom in this kinky romance based on the 1970s-set novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, here updated to a modern-day setting, and with some success: it bagged the screenplay prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.Laura Mulvey’s Big Screen ClassicsThroughout DecemberRecent recipient of a BFI Fellowship, the film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze” in a seminal 1975 essay, and thus transformed film criticism

Susan Loppert obituary

My partner Susan Loppert, who has died aged 81, was the moving force behind the development of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Arts in the 1990s. This pioneering programme, which Susan directed for 10 years (1993-2003), was a hugely innovative and imaginative project to bring the visual and performing arts into the heart of London’s newest teaching hospital.As Susan wrote in an article for the Guardian in 2006, this was not about “the odd Monet reproduction or carols at Christmas … but 2,000 original works of art hung in the vast spaces of the stunning atrial building” as well as in clinics, wards and treatment areas – many of them specially commissioned. And on top of this, full-length operas, an annual music festival, Indian dancers in residence, and workshops by artists from poets to puppeteers.Susan was born in Grahamstown, South Africa, to Phyllis (nee Orkin, and known as “Inkey” because of her dark hair), a lawyer and anti-apartheid activist, and her husband Eric Loppert, a manager