The prime minister’s focus on white abolitionists and working-class solidarity diminishes the true scale of Manchester’s reliance on the slavery economy

In May 1767, a notice was placed in the Manchester Mercury for “Any Gentleman, or Lady, wanting to purchase a Black Boy, 12 years of age” to inquire on Market Street, at the site of today’s Uniqlo clothes shop.

After 15 years of painstaking work through the scattered fragments that recorded and pointed to Manchester’s enslaving history, I still don’t think I have come to terms with my moment of discovery, a few months ago, of those few words captured in black and white. The sale of a human being, a child, on our busiest shopping street.

From 1945 to 1989 security police relied on tens of thousands of spies to suppress dissent. To rebuild trust, their files will finally be made public

Hungary’s new government will on Wednesday reveal the names of tens of thousands of state informants from the communist era in an attempt to confront the past and rebuild public trust.

From 1945 to 1989, Hungary’s communist state-security services relied on an extensive network of informants to monitor society and suppress dissent. Some were blackmailed or coerced into reporting on neighbours, friends, colleagues and even family members; others were recruited through promises of various advantages.

Are you rummaging about for bits of wire and pumpkin-coloured crêpe paper and wondering if a scorch-marked tea-towel will work as a devil’s cape for a nine-year-old? Spare a thought for the parents of Australian kids going to a fancy-dress party in 1887

Actually, don’t – their costumes were made by professional costumiers, befitting the hundreds of posh kids who sashayed into the lord mayoress’s fancy-dress ball for children at Adelaide town hall nearly 140 years ago. But their rare and incredibly detailed photos could provide some Halloween inspiration.

My happy place is a hushed archive reading room looking at objects. I was looking for copyright-free researching images for my latest book, Spooky Ladies, and silently squeed as these costume photos were delivered in a very long, narrow, custom-made heritage-green box by the good folk at the State Library of South Australia, packed tightly with more than 300 stiff “cabinet cards”, showing kids dressed as fairies, devils, astrologers, witches, and fortune tellers.

Fearing future catastrophe is nothing new – ancient Greek and Roman philosophers all visualized the apocalypse

Do your feelings of existential dread extend beyond your own personal mortality? Do they include fears about the survival of our culture and institutions, our species, nonhuman life and the Earth itself? Do you feel like there’s nothing that can help to wrap your head around the biggest problem we face: the end of the world as we know it?

Apocalyptic expectations are on the rise. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 39% of Americans believe that we are living in the end times.

Exclusive: East Sussex MP Helena Dollimore says ‘shambolic’ museum phone line has made her constituents lose out to ‘queue jumpers’

Hastings residents have missed out on tickets for the Bayeux tapestry after being put on hold for hours by a “glitchy and shambolic” phone system, their MP has said.

People from “1066 Country” were promised a chance to buy before a sales line opened to the public on Wednesday. But Helena Dollimore, the MP for Hastings and Rye, said it has been almost impossible for her constituents to get through to the British Museum.

From Thatcherism to global crisis to an ever-online world, she has chronicled our race to the abyss. Now she’s written a play about a blond-wigged voicepiece for an un-named, strongman ruler. Who can she mean?

Triumph, which has just opened at London’s Almeida theatre, is Caryl Churchill’s latest piece of explosive minimalism. Running at just 20 minutes, it skewers contemporary barbarism without mentioning the names of Trump, Putin or any of the other supposedly strong national leaders. It works through historical analogy and is a reminder that Churchill – while “always ahead of the game” in the words of the play’s director, James Macdonald – has in recent years developed a form of elliptical drama for which the apt word might be compressionism.

At the heart of Churchill’s new play is an edgy romance between a male journalist and a female press officer who dons a blond wig for her screen appearances and who is a vigorous apologist for a cruel, vindictive, narcissistic emperor.

A new play revisits the story of Ireland’s 18th-century German refugees, whose experience of prejudice and exclusion resonates with today’s debates over immigration

In the early 18th century, a few thousand Germans fled religious persecution and near starvation in their homeland and ended up in remote rural Irish villages. The Irish Palatines, as they were known, were poor, conservative homesteaders who couldn’t speak the language and were the object of suspicion and violence – precursors to the displaced Syrians or Afghans of the past decade.

Their story is told in Refuge, a co-production between Staatstheater Mainz and the Irish company Fishamble. Part love story, part social commentary, it is performed by a mixed cast, mainly in English but with some German interludes.

Exclusive: Theresa Musgrove unearths newspaper archives showing one Alice Shepherd was severely punished in 1836 for similarly innocent request

Could a consumptive young woman called Alice Shepherd have been the inspiration for Oliver Twist? That is a question now being posed by a historian, who has discovered parallels between the brutality suffered by a real-life pauper incarcerated in one of Victorian London’s notorious workhouses and Charles Dickens’s fictional orphan.

In researching a new book on Dickens, Theresa Musgrove unearthed 1836 newspaper reports on Alice Shepherd, who endured starvation and solitary confinement within a workhouse in Hendon, after a magistrate ruled she was to be punished for daring to ask for permission to take a walk.

Australians are conversing less every year, with a recent study showing we lost an average of 338 spoken words each day between 2005 and 2019

We talk a lot about losing our ability to write as a result of AI. I’m convinced our greatest loss might be our ability to listen. Listening to different views and entering into different worlds is integral to our humanity.

But Australians are conversing less every year. While rapidly evolving AI tools and chatbots promise faster responses and so-called “empathetic” listening, a recent study showed we lost an average of 338 spoken words each day between 2005 and 2019. That adds up to a staggering loss of 120,000 spoken words per person, compared with the year before.

In a new book, German artist and writer Philipp Ruch argues that viewing the ascent of Hitler’s NSDAP through the prism of the Third Reich has distorted our understanding of fascism’s electoral breakthrough

With your art collective Centre for Political Beauty you famously built a replica of the Holocaust memorial on a property next to the home of an AfD politician. Now you’ve written a history book about the Nazis’ rise to power. Don’t we already know everything there is to know about the 1932 elections, the Reichstag fire and the Enabling Act of 1933?

About three years ago I became interested in how Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ party (NSDAP) rose to prominence when Germany was still a democracy, because I hoped it could tell us something about the success of rightwing extremist movements today. From looking at historical sources, I realised that the Reichstag elections of 14 September 1930 were in many ways more important than what happened in 1932 and 1933. And I expected it to be an open-and-shut case. But the more I looked into it, the more I realised that most of the theories we have to explain the rise of the Nazis don’t make sense – the data tells a completely different, far darker story.

‘I’d read stories about gangs killing drug-pushers who targeted young people. Police would find their bodies at the bottom of five-storey buildings. I didn’t want to go looking for them alone’

The late 1960s and most of the 1970s were a difficult time for New York. I’d moved there from France in 1965 with a reporter friend and a plan to start a little agency, but soon found myself working alone. It could be a dangerous city, especially at night, but I enjoyed taking pictures of everyday life around me. In 1969, I became the first foreign correspondent for the Paris-based Gamma Agency, but always insisted on working on personal projects rather than assignments.

Reading the New York Times in 1972, I would see stories about gangs in the Bronx that were killing drug-pushers who targeted young people in the area. The police would find their bodies on the kerb at the bottom of five-storey buildings they’d been thrown off. The gangs included the Savage Nomads and the Dirty Dozen, but the one I was most interested in was the most dangerous: the Savage Skulls.

I felt a duty to write about the Tang dynasty and its incredible social and cultural sophistication – but also to connect my Chinese past with my child

During the Tang dynasty, which lasted from the seventh to the early 10th century, Vikings were raiding the coasts of what today is called Europe. In the small archipelago now known as Britain, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms flitted by. Meanwhile, in Mesoamerica, after 3,000 years of flourishing, the Maya civilisation was collapsing. In the east, China had been united for nine centuries and the Tang dynasty was already a proverbial high point of world culture.

Exclusive: Collection’s 300,000 pages record lives of enslaved people in countries including the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa and Trinidad

Nearly 4m records documenting the lives of enslaved people across 20 former British colonies have been made searchable online for the first time.

The records have been digitised and indexed by the genealogy company Ancestry, which has partnered with the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London.

Register of British Slave Traders reveals how deeply the trafficking of Africans was embedded in the country’s politics, economy, institutions and culture

Two obstacles have prevented us from appreciating the significance of the slave trade in British history. The first arose from the abolition campaign, which finally overcame opposition in parliament in 1807. The abolitionists promoted the idea that opposition to the slave trade flowed naturally from British values: justice, freedom and Christian benevolence. The success of this strategy obscured the role those same British values had played in supporting the trafficking. Today, Britain’s leaders place abolition in the pantheon of great and definitive national moments.

The second obstacle has been the ingrained tendency of the British to offshore the causes and effects of African chattel slavery to the Americas. According to this view, slavery, and the racial thinking it engendered, was an American, not European concern. But Europeans transported the great majority of enslaved African people to the Americas and reaped huge advantages from doing so. These advantages reshaped European societies.

One Guardian contributor was tasked with creating a modern-day version of the medieval masterpiece, the other with reviewing the original. Both their visions proved terrifyingly pertinent. Here’s how they both tackled it

Our journalists often draw connections between seemingly disparate issues or events to give people a fuller grasp of how things interrelate. But not every story can convey the scope and complexity of today’s algorithmically warped reality.

One of the Guardian’s regular cartoonists has managed this feat by drawing inspiration from a medieval embroidery made almost 1,000 years ago. Edith Pritchett was asked by her editors on the Guardian’s Saturday magazine to draw a modern-day version of the Bayeux tapestry, the 11th-century artwork that has been capturing imaginations this month as it goes on public display in the UK for the first time since its creation. Her updated version was included as a pullout poster in the print edition of the Guardian last weekend and also published as a special scrollable digital feature.

Visitors got a first glimpse of the medieval artefact after it went on display at the British Museum in London

On the day Bayeux tapestry tickets were released, Megan Stockwell was at the beach. She was so determined to lock down her spot, that she sat with her toes in the sand for an hour, waiting in the online queue.

“The whole ticket buying experience felt like what other people would do to get Taylor Swift tickets. I was like, ‘oh God, am I, like, the geek version of this?’” she recalled.

Sunday’s election could bring in Germany’s first far-right state government since the Nazi era

Germany is embarking on a crucial election period this month, with three key state polls that could markedly change the political terrain and make life decidedly harder for the federal government under the chancellor, Friedrich Merz.

All eyes are on Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, where about 1.7 million people are eligible to vote, followed by Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin on 20 September. In all three contests, the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is expected to make strong gains.

Visitors to Nostell in West Yorkshire will get to see cutting-edge research into work considered the only faithful copy of Holbein masterpiece

A spectacular, internationally important painting of Thomas More and his family is to have its secrets explored as the public look on.

The open heritage science project, scheduled to begin on Thursday, is a UK first and will deploy techniques used at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam during its famous public restoration of Rembrandt’s masterpiece The Night Watch.

As a child, being taken to the Caribbean celebration was a drag. But once sound systems arrived in the 1970s, it became an unmissable yearly pilgrimage offering a sense of freedom

My earliest memories of the Notting Hill carnival are of being mildly irritated. In its 1960s infancy, the event was strictly a Caribbean affair, transplanted to Ladbroke Grove as authentically as was practical. Its purpose was as obvious as its origins: giving Caribbean arrivals a chance to celebrate themselves by bringing the vibrancy of the home they left behind to these drab streets for a couple of days.

Vital as this was – and it really was – it didn’t cut much ice with surly 10- or 11-year-olds like me, being dragged around behind parading steelbands. Yes, it was great to see so many Black people out in the open together and your mums and dads laughing and having a good time, but did we need to be here? There was football to be played and bikes to be ridden, yet so many of us were being forced to walk for what seemed like miles following “old people music”.