When Farage voted Green and The Times backed Corbyn

Villains
Time magazine, at least according to Donald Trump, who has described the photo used of him on the cover of the latest issue as “super bad” and “the Worst of All Time”. I’m no fan of The Donald, says Emma Brockes in The Guardian, but on this he’s totally right. The photo, shot from below, gives readers an “unrestricted view” up the US president’s nose, and makes his turkey wattle neck look like “a ski run after the snow has melted”. His eye is reptilian; his hair “the flyaway gauze of a newborn”. They really stitched him up.

Villains
Plug-in hybrids, which are almost as bad for the environment as petrol cars. A new study of onboard data has found that so-called PHEVs, which run on both electric batteries and combustion engines, pump out only 19% less CO2 than petrol and diesel engines rather than the claimed 75% reduction. The discrepancy is thought to be due to overestimates of how much the cars use electric mode – a measly 27% of driving time, rather than the official figure of 84%.

Hero
Natalie Grabow, 80, who has become the oldest woman ever to complete the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii. The grandmother from New Jersey finished the gruelling course – a 2.4 mile swim, followed by a 112-mile bike ride and then a 26.2-mile marathon – in 16 hours and 45 minutes. She took first place in the 80-84 age group (she was the only entrant) and the woman whose record she broke was on the finishing line to congratulate her.

Villains
Lairy parents in Merton, southwest London, whose awful behaviour when watching their children playing sport has led to a blanket ban on adult attendance. The Merton School Sport Partnership, which runs events across more than 40 primary schools in the borough, cited parents cutting across finish lines to physically impede runners and hurling abuse at officials – many of whom are themselves only secondary school pupils.

Heroes
Dad’s Army, who weren’t the duffers they were portrayed as in the famous BBC TV series. Newly discovered World War Two papers reveal that the Home Guard, made up of volunteers who were either unfit or ineligible for front-line service, carried out extensive exercises involving weapons training, sabotage and strategic defence. “They certainly weren’t bumbling idiots,” military historian Taff Gillingham tells The Daily Telegraph. “They were seen as a regular fighting force.”

Wielding a scythe and praying for the apocalypse

What if the progressive left and global capitalism are, at base, one and the same thing: “engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine”? This, says John Gray in The New Statesman, is the argument at the heart of an “invigorating” new collection of essays by the ecologist-turned-philosopher Paul Kingsnorth. These two forces – the left and capitalism – work like a “pincer”, he says. “One attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to ‘heteronormativity’ to national identities”, before the other “moves in to monetise the fragments”. In our politically divided and socially atomised age, with human connection increasingly given over to interactions with machines, it’s hard to argue with this “refreshingly subversive” point of view.

Though previously a full-time environmental activist, Kingsnorth – who lives with his family on a self-sustaining farm in Galway and cuts his grass with a scythe – despises today’s “climate justice” movement. Modern greens, he says, have taken a common-sense feeling – love for the natural world and a concern for preserving it – and melted it into the omnicause bucket, along with anti-colonialism, gender politics and “every other fashionable orthodoxy”. In this view, saving the planet is merely a matter of technical fixes: plaster the countryside with solar panels and wind farms and re-engineer society on a progressive model. Kingsnorth argues that only by “re-enchanting the natural world” – recognising the “soul” in nature, and engaging with it on a spiritual, rather than “narrowly scientistic” level – can we understand how to save it. Where his argument runs aground is on how that might look. For Kingsnorth, the usual solutions – nuclear, solar, benign AI, judiciously applied – are a nightmare, a “deification of the diabolical Machine”. He thinks, somewhat disturbingly, that only an apocalypse will do.

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth is available to buy here.

The new Lee Miller exhibition is the most comprehensive display of the late American photographer’s work ever shown in the UK, says Charlotte Jansen in The Guardian. The collection follows her “dazzling, daring” career rising from Vogue cover girl to Vogue photographer – snapping self-portraits and fashionable hats – to courageous war photographer, getting “as close to the frontlines as she was permitted”. Much of her most famous work is there, including her portrait in Hitler’s bathtub with her boots, filthy with mud from Dachau concentration camp, standing defiantly on the bathmat. But there’s plenty of never-before-seen work too, including “sensuous” desert pictures from her time in 1930s Cairo and the Vienna opera house, “battered to ruins by bombs”. And there’s a “fascinating room” devoted to the work she created with surrealist artist Man Ray – languorous pictures of necks, torsos and breasts – which arguably “changed the course of art history”. Miller was many things, but this exhibition proves that above all, “she was an artist”. Tate Britain, runs until February.