Charity promises to buy and set up new not-for-profit parcels of land with peppercorn rents for two communities

Frustrated beetroot, bean and berry growers can now enter their dream contest: to win two new allotment sites , which will be purchased in neighbourhoods starved of good places to grow fruit and vegetables.

The charity Green Allotments is pledging to buy and set up new not-for-profit allotment sites with peppercorn rents for two lucky communities.

Many brands with famous names attached are a bust. But these are the ones that offer genuinely excellent products

Depending on the source you read, between 50 and 100 celebrity-fronted beauty brands have launched in the past five years. This might seem like the golden era of celebrity beauty, but in reality many have already crashed and burned.

Rosie Huntingdon-Whiteley has exited (the very good) Rose Inc; Harry Styles’ Pleasing seems to be little more than a merch stall with a great name and some mediocre beauty thrown in; Ariana Grande’s r.e.m. makeup line has withdrawn from the UK; Jared Leto quickly severed all ties with his somewhat baffling skincare enterprise Twentynine Palms. Many more, I believe, are teetering on the brink. But which brands deliver more than an additional revenue stream for the rich, making products worth buying regardless of the name?

Chef Hugh Corcoran had enough of ‘window dining’ after seeing an increase in guests splitting main courses

Shortly after opening his north London restaurant, Hugh Corcoran noticed a pattern among some of his diners: large groups ordering tap water, starters and mains to share. So, he took to social media. “Restaurants are not public benches,” he wrote on his Instagram last week. “You are there to spend money.”

By the weekend, his post had accrued 150 comments, some accusing him of being tone deaf, others in agreement. Either way, a discourse was born.

The good news is, your phone isn’t listening to you. But that’s because your doorbell has already sold all your secrets

There’s one battle my husband and I have fought ever since we started cohabiting: whether to allow “smart” appliances in our home. He, an enthusiastic gadget fan, would happily connect all of our household goods to the internet so he could control them from his phone. I, a jaded tech journalist, am far too paranoid to surround myself with a bunch of data-guzzling surveillance machines.

So I felt somewhat vindicated when I saw the latest story about a seemingly innocuous utensil apparently getting a bit too data-hungry. The consumer group Which? found that three air fryers it tested had connected phone apps that requested permission to record audio – not something you’d imagine to be a critical function for an object whose sole purpose is to cook food. The devices also wanted to know users’ exact locations.

Victoria Turk is a London-based journalist covering technology, culture and society

The freezer’s a happy hunting ground for this fragrant, one-pan spinach and peas dish in a sweet-sour hot sauce, and light sponge cakes with whipped vanilla cream and frozen berries

The freezer, to my mind, serves one of three purposes. The best-case scenario is that it’s home to a stash of neatly labelled and perfectly portioned meals for the weeks to come, and the worst-case scenario is that it’s the place where food goes to die. In between these two extremes, we have purpose three: namely, it provides space for all those ice trays that the last person to use failed to refill and, crucially, a home for a frankly ridiculous number of bags of peas, half a bag of spinach and last summer’s berries. Here are two recipes for the latter.

Some cases of estrangement stem from a traumatic childhood. But in others it can come as a shock to parents who believe they did their best. People on both sides of family rifts share their stories

It’s a year and a half since Jody last spoke to her mother, and the conversation ended badly. Though their relationship was always fractious, with long spells of not speaking, Jody had been feeling anxious about some big changes in her life and was craving comfort. Listening to some old voicemails from her mother made her nostalgic enough to pick up the phone. But the call quickly degenerated.

“My mom has a proclivity for expressing her emotions in really extreme, volatile ways. She lashes out and insults people,” says Jody, who is 29 and in the process of moving overseas. Her mother has suffered long-term mental health problems, she says, and sees herself as a victim conspired against by others: Jody learned young that if she didn’t beg for forgiveness when her mother started hurling accusations, she would be frozen out. But not this time. “When it finally clicked that my mom weaponised her own emotions to manipulate mine, I stopped feeling a reflex to defend myself.” She hung up, blocked her mother’s number, and decided they would never speak again.

Help future generations or feed the starving? How besieged wartime scientists responded to a terrible dilemma

Leningrad, 1942. A city under siege. Hitler has declared that it must be rendered uninhabitable and razed to the ground. A ring of German steel ensures almost no food can enter, and three million people are starving to death. The streets are stacked with emaciated corpses, some of which bear evidence of cannibalism. And yet a former tsarist palace in the city centre, close to the Hermitage Museum, houses a great repository of nuts, grains and tubers, the result of decades of plant-hunting by some of the foremost botanists of the era. This is the All Union Institute of Plant Breeding, otherwise known as the Plant Institute, the world’s first seed bank. What will the scientists who work here do? Safeguard their collection, and with it the prospect of high-yield, disease-resistant crops to feed future generations? Or eat it?

This moral dilemma lies at the heart of Simon Parkin’s book The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad, a history of the Plant Institute during the siege, which lasted almost 900 days, from 1941 to 1944. As we have come to expect from Parkin, whose 2022 book The Island of Extraordinary Captives looked at internment camps for “enemy aliens” on the Isle of Man, it is a richly researched and meticulously observed account of a little-explored corner of 20th-century history.

The author of the Istanbul-set Inspector Ikmen novels takes a trip into the Old City’s thrilling and turbulent past

It is a cold, autumnal wee hour of the morning in Istanbul and I am sipping a sweet, orchid-root-flavoured drink called sahlep and smoking a water pipe. I’m lurking outside a nargile (hookah pipe) joint on a small road called Ticarethane Sokak in what is known as the Old City or Historic Peninsula. This is where many of the city’s great monuments are, including the Hagia Sophia mosque, Topkapi Palace and the Hippodrome. This is also where Inspector Cetin Ikmen, the central character of my novels and subsequent BBC TV series The Turkish Detective lives. Like Ikmen, I enjoy wandering the city in the dark early hours of the morning. When only the hardiest, the mad, the bad and the protectors of the city roam the streets, so also do the phantoms appear.

In common with Ikmen, I disappear easily. I’m a woman of a certain age in a big coat and battered boots, and I walk like a man. I avoid eye contact. I’m here for the ghosts. Walking down Ticarethane Sokak, I join the main thoroughfare, Divan Yolu, and make my way past shuttered shops and silent coffee houses to the royal tombs on the corner of Bab-ı Ali Caddesi. This consists of a small cemetery for Ottoman princes and princesses, and a mausoleum that houses the remains of three 19th-century sultans – ranging in character from reformers to despots. Now they lie side by side in darkness, stared at by me through a metal grille. The ghost of Sultan Abdülaziz (1830-1876) – or maybe a white cat – briefly flits across my field of vision when I remember that he was found dead in mysterious circumstances.