Kanye West announces tour dates in Russia

A vivid and hopeful study of how culture endures in the midst of extreme violence Towards the end of her subtly piercing book about art in wartime, Charlotte Higgins recounts an autumn visit to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, in the north-east of the country, a short drive from the Russian border. In a tranquil park, she sees a man standing in a stream, making stones balance on top of each other in a teetering tower – “a metaphor of life in that city,” she writes, “that would have seemed too obvious for a novel”. Still, as a good novelist would, Higgins doesn’t seem to beg telling details from a place so much as have them leap to her open eye and ear. The cartoons a boy is watching that fall silent in a power cut, allowing the distant boom of explosions on the frontline to be heard. A cityscape tattooed on a young poet’s arm that cuts off suddenly where skin from his leg was grafted after he was torn up by shrapnel. Cataracts of larkspur, as Higgins describes them, in a field in the frontline Donbas region, “pouring down the hill, pooling at the bottom into a great lake of blooms … Larkspur thrives on ground where there has been recent disturbance.”..

The former heavyweight boxing champion shares a child with the Heroes actress, who died on Sunday.

Chain tells customers to ‘pipe down’ and use earphones instead, calling its venues ‘an oasis of tranquillity’ The pub chain Wetherspoons has banned customers from playing music or taking calls on speaker after growing complaints about the noise. The company announced it had introduced the ban across its 792 pubs, saying sounds from smartphones and tablet computers had become an “increasing problem in recent years”...