‘When I couldn’t do the spitting scene, Sean took me aside and said: “Ron, if you don’t actually spit in my face, we’ll be here all day.” So I let one fly – and kept having to redo it’

I read an article about a curious book that had great reviews in Italy, a murder mystery about monks in the middle ages fighting for the fictional missing part of Aristotle’s Poetics. I said: “This is for me.” Since childhood, I had been fascinated with medieval and religious architecture, and Aristotle’s Poetics is my favourite literary work.

Accusations of classism chime with my experience 20 years ago. So all hail the Bristol graduate awarding state schools red plaques

“So, where did you go to school?” On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like a loaded question. I was mostly bemused when I first started university 20 years ago and found myself being asked it repeatedly by other students. Why were they so interested? Surely no one would have heard of the north Wales comprehensive I had attended? When they countered my baffled reaction with “Charterhouse” or “Marlborough”, how was I supposed to respond? When one student said, of another, “He went to Winchester, you know”, I stared blankly at him, not understanding why he was telling me about someone else’s day trip to a city in Hampshire (“Oh, did he have a nice time?”). It was strange, new territory.

Asking someone where they went to school is often not an innocent question. It is a way of “placing” you on a social scale. As thousands of freshers settle in to their first terms at university, a significant proportion will be battling with this dawning awareness that Britain runs on a network of private schools whose alumni often seem to know, or know of, one another. State-school students might have been dimly aware of it before, but nothing puts it into sharper focus than freshers’ week. It’s clear that little has changed since my own student days. I was saddened to read recent reports of classism at St Andrews, which led to a student’s announcement that she would not return this academic year: “Working-class students have been made to feel ashamed of their home life at university,” she said. The pervasiveness of private school culture, as I suppose you could call it, remains nationwide and deeply embedded.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

Breathable bedding, slanted tweezers and an indispensable garlic press … here are the buys you wish you’d discovered sooner. Plus, the best walking poles, tested

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Sometimes a product changes your life – or, more likely, just makes your day 10% better.

Whether it’s something small-but-mighty (a gadget that helps you open a jar without swearing, tweezers that get every hair) or a more expensive item that has proved its worth over the years (a much-loved designer dress, a garden mulch-maker), we asked you to tell us about the buys that have made your life just a little bit better.

At conference here in Birmingham I found a small battalion of centrist remainers with a vision of the Conservative party to come

You can walk all the way from Somerset to Sussex without crossing a Tory-run constituency, if you wish. You could also travel through each of the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Surrey without setting foot in Tory lands. They are now mainly Liberal Democrat, and there’s not one Tory MP in all of Oxfordshire.

Is Kemi Badenoch bothered? Everything she does seems cleverly designed to keep those places lost to her forever as she woos Reform voters, unsuccessfully. The more she leans right, the more she repels home counties moderates. Those Reform voters are not coming back, psephologists say. Without reclaiming the old “blue wall”, there is no hope, ever, of a Tory majority, say both profs Tim Bale and Rob Ford and just about every political authority you care to ask.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Cost of living crisis and drop in international students hits market for purpose-built accommodation

“It was dead in the middle of summer, it was a shock,” says Nathalie Sriwiboonrattan. The fourth-year game design student at Abertay University was at home with her family thousands of miles away in Thailand when she discovered the owner of her Scottish studio flat had abruptly gone bust.

“I was like, my hands are tied. I’m not in the country. I don’t know what to do,” she says. Sriwiboonrattan was forced to act quickly to secure new housing for the academic year, which has just begun, paying £850 to have her possessions moved.

A story of storico ribelle, produced by a small group of mountain herders according to a traditional farming system based on seasonal and rotational grazing

My journey into the world of storico ribelle began with a shared passion for photography and the mountains. A close friend of mine lives in the Orobie Alps. He loves the mountains and the natural environment that surrounds him, and we share the same passion for photography. When I finally went to visit him, I discovered a way of experiencing the mountains that was very different from the one I knew growing up in the Apennines, where I come from.

What struck me was not only the landscape, but the relationship people still have with it. Here, I discovered a world where the mountain is not simply a place to visit or explore, but a place to live and work. A world where cheese is still a tradition rather than an industrial product, and where the rhythms of the seasons, the animals and the daily work of the alpeggiatori – the mountain herders – are still deeply connected.

A dozen B-1 bombers stationed at Gloucestershire base were redeployed to US on Sunday amid concerns over possible threat from Iran

Downing Street has insisted RAF Fairford is secure a day after the US air force suddenly withdrew a dozen B-1 bombers that had been stationed at the Gloucestershire base amid security concerns about a possible threat from Iran.

The prime minister’s official spokesperson, speaking during a scheduled briefing, said “yes” when asked if the military site was safe – contrasting with the concern showed by the US military during the hasty redeployment the day before.

Thousands expected to join marches of support on Tuesday across the country amid growing concerns over police response

• Europe live – latest updates

France is bracing for a national day of protests and high-school blockades as a youth protest movement gathers pace amid a growing debate over the scale of the police response.

In one incident, a 15-year-old protesting against what demonstrators said were France’s dilapidated ⁠and understaffed ​schools ‌had his hand ‌blown off outside a high school in the northern town of Lens, said François-Xavier Lauch, the prefect of Pas-de-Calais.

Progressive voters and supporters of incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva left reeling after far-right surge

Flávio Bolsonaro is in pole position to win Brazil’s presidential election, after a far-right tsunami propelled him to a shock first-round victory over the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, leaving progressive voters reeling.

The 45-year-old rightwing candidate received 56.1m votes to Lula’s 53.8m – 47.03% to 45.16% – meaning the 80-year-old leftwinger has a mountain to climb if he is to bounce back in the second round on 25 October. Never, since the return of democracy to Brazil in 1985, has the first-round runner-up managed to turn the game around and win the second ballot.

Nearly 90 organisations write to Andy Burnham urging him to take decisive action to end violence against women and girls

• From unwanted touching to rape: the scale of child-on-child abuse

A coalition of nearly 90 organisations has written to the prime minister calling for “decisive action” on violence against women and girls after a Guardian investigation revealed the scale of child-on-child sexual abuse in schools in England and Wales.

The groups urged Labour to redouble efforts to deliver on its manifesto promise to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) and “end this cycle of harm once and for all”.