The Gloucestershire-based troupe, created 26 years ago by the late Nell Gifford and her husband Toti, is back with a new performance blending traditional skills with cutting-edge theatrics … and the dreaded Wheel of Death

‘Everything you see has been built by us,” Toti Gifford informs me with a sweep of his arms. I’m being shown around Fennells Farm in Gloucestershire, home to the much-loved Giffords Circus since 2014, with the company deep in rehearsals for its latest production, Waterfield. There’s an awful lot to see. The landscape is green and lush and scattered with livestock, with the site still functioning as a farm and brewery. The company headquarters sits inside a huge repurposed cattle shed and the farm is peppered with makeshift barns, all built by hand and rammed with props, paints and all manner of circus mementoes and mysteries (including, quite brilliantly, a human cannonball).

There’s a new winter venue and a restaurant and hotel under construction, with both scheduled to open over the next few years – the dreaded planning permission pending. The area surrounding the famous circus tent, topped with twinkling lights, has also been spruced up. Sick of wading through mud whenever it rained, Toti Gifford – who also runs a successful landscaping business – decided to dig up the field and replace it entirely with pebbles.

Brent crude jumps another 7% to highest since March 2022 on report US is considering military options against Iran

Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.

The Bank of England is expected to keep interest rates on hold at noon, as policymakers assess the economic fallout from the Iran war.

Economists will be looking for any clues on future rate policy in the statement and the subsequent press conference. The nine-member rate-setting panel, led by central bank governor Andrew Bailey , could hint at rate hikes in the months ahead if the conflict in the Middle East — where a shaky ceasefire is in place — drives inflation higher.

For now, the monetary policy committee is expected to keep the bank’s main rate at 3.75%, while one or two members could vote for a quarter-point hike as a premptive move to ward off higher inflation.

Before the US and Israel began their attacks on Iran on 28 February, the central bank had been expected to cut borrowing costs this year, as inflation was predicted to fall back toward its 2% target during the spring. The war has since upended the bank’s predictions.

Sandra Horsfield , an economist at Investec, said the “repercussions of the conflict are still keenly felt and uncertainty about how the situation could evolve also remains high”.

This portrait of everyday life in an Istanbul neighbourhood buffeted by change has far wider relevance

Thankfully, the attack left only black eyes and bloodied faces. It was in Karagümrük, a tough neighbourhood in Istanbul’s old city, once known for mafia types and Turks on the hard right. But, as Suzy Hansen explains, it had been transformed by an influx of Syrian refugees – until the locals apparently decided they’d had enough, and came for them with sticks, baseball bats and knives for carving doner kebab.

So begins From Life Itself, in which Hansen traces a story that illuminates a politics of mass migration and nationalist backlash that has resonances far beyond Turkey. It is a more ambitious book than that, too. An American who lived in Istanbul and visited Karagümrük for more than a decade – during which Turkey’s enfeebled democracy came under ever more sustained assault – she hoped to convey “how ordinary people experience authoritarianism in the 21st century – how our era feels”.

Polling puts Reform, led in Scotland by former peer Malcolm Offord, neck and neck with Labour for second place

Reform UK represents an acute threat to Scottish self government, John Swinney has warned, adding that nationalist victories in Scotland and Wales in May could “irrevocably change” the dynamics of constitutional debate across the UK.

While the Scottish National party enjoys a comfortable polling lead ahead of the Holyrood elections next Thursday, recent polling has put Reform, led in Scotland by the millionaire and former Conservative peer Malcolm Offord, neck and neck with Scottish Labour for second place.

Fadi Saqr is accused of mass killings of civilians in Tadamon, Damascus, where people say he must face justice

A Syrian rights commission is preparing a case accusing Fadi Saqr, a militia leader within the Assad regime , of involvement in crimes against humanity and war crimes, a senior Syrian official has told the Guardian.

Saqr is a former commander of the National Defence Forces (NDF) militia and is widely accused of involvement in the mass killing and forcible disappearance of civilians in the Tadamon neighbourhood of Damascus, as well as other parts of the Syrian capital.

A writer’s retreat to the remote Irish hotel in which his parents spent their honeymoon brings him face-to-face with all manner of creepy goings-on in a gruesome and eccentric black-comic shocker

Adam Scott has an unexpectedly dark, unsympathetic character to play in this black-comic supernatural horror which thumps you with some pretty efficient jump scares. He plays Ohm, a successful American writer brooding over the brutally nihilistic ending to his latest novel; he is also lonely, sliding into alcoholism and clearly agonised by some unacknowledged pain in his personal life. Ohm decides the time is right to take the ashes of his dead parents – which he has kept for years – and scatter them in the one place he knows they were happy, and where he perhaps hopes to siphon off some postdated happiness for himself.

This is a run-down hotel in remote, rural Ireland where his mum and dad spent their honeymoon. Arriving in this picturesque but faintly disturbing place, where he is the only guest, Ohm is baffled and shocked by the sight of a dead goat in the car park; it turns out it had to be culled because it was climbing up on the guest’s vehicles to look at its reflection in the paintwork. Ohm is entirely obnoxious to the hotel staff as well as to Fiona (Florence Ordesh) who works behind the bar; she is indifferent to his celebrity, but senses how unhappy he is. Ohm wonders if his mum and dad actually stayed in the hotel’s quaint “honeymoon suite”, but this is boarded up; the reason for this, he is given to understand, is that a 400-year-old witch is held captive there.

From golf tournaments to shooting parties, these images of photographer Will Vogt’s social circle offer us an intimate glimpse of a world that feels out of reach

The natural world is the headliner at these joyous gatherings, while the support acts include live music, immersive art and fire ceremonies

Winner of the UK’s best micro-festival in 2025, Between the Trees returns to Candleston Woods in the spectacular Merthyr Mawr national nature reserve (between Cardiff and Swansea) this year. Designed to reconnect people to the natural world, the programme features science and nature activities, folk music and storytelling. Workshops in the Eco Hub include micrographia sessions – exploring the world of insects on the reserve – and nature crafts. The Seren area has plenty of new talks and walks on offer, including stories of Welsh witches and forage-and-taste outings . With camping spots next to a wild beach and huge dunes, the site itself will ignite plenty of awe.
27-30 August , weekend tickets £ 195 adults, £ 50 children, betweenthetrees.co.uk

WPP accused of breaching its climate policy after report reveals firm linked to twice as much oil advertising as US rivals

A British advertising conglomerate has helped the oil companies ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP spend an estimated $1.5bn (£1.1bn) on adverts in the US since the 2015 Paris agreement to tackle the climate crisis, a report shows.

London-based WPP was the leading advertising group serving the US’s oil industry over the past decade, according to analysis by the climate investigations platform DeSmog. The figure is nearly twice the respective amounts linked to its US rivals Omnicom and Interpublic Group (IPG), which merged in November.