The new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey has been released.

Starring Matt Damon as mythological hero Odysseus, the epic film retells the story of Odysseus’ 10-year voyage back to his homeland of Ithaca after the Greek victory at the siege of Troy.

The trailer offers snippets of the main players, including Damon, Tom Holland as Odysseus’s son Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, and Robert Pattinson as Antinous, one of the crowd of suitors vying to marry Penelope.

There are also brief glimpses of some of the mythological threats Odysseus encounters, including a whirlpool, the Cyclops and Charlize Theron as the nymph Calypso.

In July a cinema-only trailer for the reportedly $250m (£184m) budget production was leaked online, and in November Nolan revealed he had shot more than 2m feet of film for The Odyssey, which has been filmed entirely on large-format Imax cameras.

The Odyssey is due for release on 16 July in Australia and 17 July in the UK and US.

At the start of A Single Man, George Falconer wakes up at home in the morning and drags himself despondently to the bathroom. There he stares at himself in the mirror, observing not so much a face as “the expression of a predicament … a dull harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle”.

Set in 1962, Christopher Isherwood’s landmark novel follows a day in the life of a 58-year-old British expat and college professor living in California. George is silently trying to come to terms with the death of his partner, Jim, after a car accident. We accompany him from his morning ablutions – during which he reflects on the judgment of his homophobic neighbour Mrs Strunk – and his drive to work, to a teaching session, a gym workout and a drink with his friend Charley. Throughout we are privy to his internal monologue, which reveals George as a man prone to existential dread and who is isolated in a world that, owing to his sexuality, regards him with suspicion.

This is a new recording with actor Alex Jennings (The Crown, A Very English Scandal) as narrator. In his clipped RP tones, he delivers a performance that hums with melancholy and buried rage. As we bear witness to George’s every waking thought, action and memory, we understand the dissociative properties of grief and the masks people wear that allow them to get through the day.

Available via Naxos Audiobooks, 4hr 38min

Further listening

Winter
Ali Smith, Penguin Audio, 7hr 16min
Bridgerton’s Adjoa Andoh reads the second in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet. Partially inspired by Dickens, it tells of Sophia Cleves, a modern-day Scrooge living in a large house in Cornwall whose only company is a ghostly vision of a child’s head.

Flesh
David Szalay, Penguin Audio, 9hr 25min
This Booker prize-winning novel traces the life of a working-class Hungarian man from his teens to middle age. After meeting István as a 15-year-old boy, we follow him as he joins the military and then moves to London to work for the super-rich. Read by actor Daniel Weyman.

The first trailer has been released online for Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey.

Starring Matt Damon as the classic Greek hero, the trailer offers a series of shots of a bearded Damon as he sets out to return from the fall of Troy as his gravelly voiceover announces: “After years of war … no one could stand between my men … and home … not even me.”

The trailer also provides brief glimpses of Anne Hathaway as Odysseus’s wife Penelope and of Tom Holland as his son Telemachus, as Odysseus battles storms and other obstacles on his way back to Ithaca.

The trailer arrives shortly after a six-minute sequence was released in cinemas on 12 December; before that, a cinema trailer had been debuted in July, but was leaked online. The newly released trailer appears to be considerably different, and follows Nolan’s revelation that he used 2 million ft of film on Imax cameras in making the movie. The Odyssey is due for release on 16 July 2026 in Australia and on 17 July in the UK and the US.

Christopher Nolan says he has used over more than 2 million ft of film for his adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, which is in post-production, after the director finished shooting in August.

In an interview with Empire magazine, Nolan said: “I’ve been out on [the sea] for the last four months. We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’s ship out there on the real waves, in the real places … We really wanted to capture how hard those journeys would have been for people. And the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world.” He added: “We shot over 2 million ft of film.”

The Odyssey has been entirely shot on the large-scale Imax format, which uses considerably more film than standard 35mm cameras. According to Indepth Cine, Imax cameras use around 337ft of 65mm film per minute,, compared to 90ft for 35mm. This suggests Nolan has shot around 100 hours of raw footage – which in fact compares relatively favourably to some other recent films; a log by editor Vashi Nedomanski suggests that Mad Max: Fury Road shot around 480 hours of raw footage, and Gone Girl shot 500 hours.

Nolan also outlined in the interview his reasons for picking the project, having been in line to direct another Homeric epic, Troy, more than two decades ago. “As a film-maker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before. And what I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with – Ray Harryhausen movies and other things – I’d never seen that done with the sort of weight and credibility that an A-budget and a big Hollywood, Imax production could do.”

He added: “By embracing the physicality of the real world in the making of the film, you do inform the telling of the story in interesting ways. Because you’re confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you.”

Speaking to the same magazine, Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, was effusive in his compliments for Nolan: “I can say, without hyperbole, that it was the best experience of my career … “I saw the [Trojan] horse on the beach and I was just like, ‘Fuck’. It was just so cool.”

Nolan’s film, which also stars Tom Holland as Odysseus’s son Telemachus, is due for release in July 2026.

It has all the makings of a classic Val McDermid mystery: a sudden death, a cast of shadowy figures and a tangle of motives buried beneath layers of official secrecy.

But this time, the queen of crime is not inventing a murder, she is revisiting one of history’s most enduring whodunnits – the mysterious death of Christopher Marlowe.

In her new play, And Midnight Never Come, McDermid explores the controversial circumstances around the death of the brilliant and subversive Elizabethan playwright who was stabbed to death in a Deptford tavern at the age of 29. Officially, Marlowe was killed over a row about a bill. Unofficially? Espionage, heresy and a state-sanctioned cover-up are all in the frame.

“This play has been a long time in the making, I started thinking about it more than 40 years ago,” McDermid said. “Over the years, I think I’ve read pretty much everything that’s been written about Marlowe.

“And I think there’s another story lurking in the background here. I’ve got my own theory of what happened. I don’t want to give away spoilers, but I will say that I don’t think Christopher Marlowe was meant to die that day. My conclusion will surprise people, but I think it will also make sense of something people have long found unsatisfactory.”

Researchers widely believe Marlowe worked as an intelligence agent during his lifetime, most likely within the spy network of Sir Francis Walsingham.

In 1587, the young writer was nearly denied his degree from Cambridge amid rumours he had travelled to Catholic seminaries abroad – a potentially treasonous act. But the privy council intervened, saying he had been “employed in matters touching the benefit of his country” and had “done Her Majesty good service”.

It was a combination of Marlowe’s access to sensitive information, his provocative writings and reported atheism, that many believe made him a target to a range of people and groups. When he was killed in May 1593, it was while he was on bail to the privy council for alleged heresy and blasphemy.

The circumstances around his stabbing were highly suspicious – his killer, Ingram Frizer, was pardoned less than a month later and no inquest records survive. Frizer and the two other men present (Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley) all had links to the Elizabethan secret service.

Some theories suggest the killing was state-sanctioned; others claim Marlowe’s death was faked and that he escaped abroad, possibly continuing to write under a pseudonym (with a fringe theory even naming him as the true author of Shakespeare’s works).

McDermid said she learned there were “a lot of reasons why you might want to get rid of” Marlowe.

“He held a lot of people’s fates in his hands,” she said. “He kept company with many powerful figures in Elizabeth’s court, some of whom were notorious for opinions that sailed close to the wind. In Elizabethan England, a man – or woman – could be executed for opinions that were open to interpretation as heresy.

“For example, Marlowe’s fellow playwright Thomas Kyd, who was also a professional scribe, was arrested and tortured for possessing material the authorities considered heretical, even though he swore he was simply doing a paid job. To get himself off the hook, Kyd claimed he’d been copying Marlowe’s words; an unlikely excuse in respect of a man who had written half a dozen plays and a substantial body of poetry!”

McDermid said the popular version of Marlowe’s death was evidently not true. “For a start it wasn’t a tavern, it was a private house owned by a woman called Eleanor Bull, who was related by marriage to one of Elizabeth’s other spy masters,” she said.

But the writer does not place much stock in the other theories about his death, including that it was a political killing. “I find this unsatisfactory,” she said.

“If his supposed enemies had wanted Marlowe out of the way, they’d have had no need of such an elaborate set-up. He was riding alone daily between Thomas Walsingham’s home in Scadbury to the privy council in Nonsuch Palace to keep the conditions of his bail – a distance of almost 18 miles through rural countryside with dozens of opportunities for an anonymous ambush and assassination.”

She added: “These were not backstreet thugs he was dealing with, they were clever and strategic men of power. It would have been well within their capabilities to get rid of Marlowe and make it look like a street brawl, or knock him out and tip him unconscious into the Thames. There would have been no need to potentially implicate anyone connected with either the Walsingham family or Marlowe’s other powerful connections.”

McDermid has been writing thrillers for more than 30 years, selling more than 19m copies worldwide and winning numerous awards. Script-in-hand readings of And Midnight Never Come will take place at Pitlochry festival theatre and the Edinburgh international book festival on 18and 19 August.

She said the play was framed by Marlowe’s final day, and paid tribute to the late writer’s extravagance.

“Marlowe was a pretty wild guy in lots of respects. He was flamboyant, he was a bit of a jack the lad. He’d get his sword out without much provocation. And he was clearly very sexy,” she said.

Donald Trump took “British naval secrets” to Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House, the former UK spy Christopher Steele says in a new book.

“I was reliably informed by impeccable sources that among the classified documents which Trump, apparently unauthorizedly, took with him to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his presidency were British naval secrets, some of the most sensitive ones in our governmental system,” Steele writes.

“It remains unclear to me, at least, why Trump would have wanted to retain such documents and what eventually happened to them.”

Steele does not say what the secrets concerned.

In a statement sent to the Guardian after this story was published on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the British Ministry of Defence said of Steele’s comments about naval secrets taken to Mar-a-Lago: “These claims are untrue.”

A former MI6 agent, Steele became famous as the author of a dossier of often unverified information on Trump and his links to Russia which caused a media sensation shortly after the 2016 election, in which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in a historic upset.

The dossier has been the subject of controversy ever since. But a US investigation under the special counsel Robert Mueller did establish that Russia interfered in the election to boost Trump, detail extensive links between the former president and Moscow, and produce numerous indictments and convictions.

Steele’s book, Unredacted: Russia, Trump and the Fight for Democracy, was published on Tuesday – a little over a month from election day as Trump runs to return to the Oval Office, against the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris. The race unfolds amid warnings of further Russian efforts to help him, including from Mueller himself.

Trump’s retention of classified documents after leaving power in 2021 was the subject of an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago and 40 criminal charges brought by the special counsel Jack Smith. That case was thrown out in June by Aileen Cannon, a Florida judge appointed under Trump. Smith has appealed.

Trump was convicted on 34 criminal charges in New York, over hush-money payments to an adult film star. His attempts to overturn the 2020 election are the subject of four federal criminal charges and eight in Georgia.

Trump was previously reported to have discussed US nuclear submarines at Mar-a-Lago with an Australian billionaire who then shared the information. Reporting of that incident did not mention “British naval secrets”.

At the time of Trump’s 2016 win, Steele was running Orbis Business Intelligence. BuzzFeed published the Trump dossier. Sensational unverified allegations, including placing Trump with sex workers in a Moscow hotel, ensured blanket coverage.

Trump angrily rejected the dossier and sued Steele. The case was thrown out this year, and Trump was ordered to pay costs, an order Steele says has not been met.

Steele now writes that the day after the 2016 election, he felt “disturbed” and “afraid – for democracy, for the United States, for the world at large”, as he felt his warnings about Trump and Russia had fallen on deaf ears.

“We were no longer even on good terms with the FBI. We had tried to warn them, and the public, about Trump and Russia and we had failed. How long would it be before Trump himself found out about our reporting – and about us? How would he respond?

“‘Chaos is about to break out,’ I thought.”

He and his partner, he says, felt they had “a fresh duty: we needed to tell the British government [about our work] because Trump’s election could pose a direct threat to UK national interests … if Trump were compromised, the British government needed to know”.

Steele says he visited Charles Farr, chair of the British joint intelligence committee, who circulated a summary of Steele’s findings “among the key people in government including senior British officials and ministers”. But, Steele writes, repeating testimony to MPs, the Conservative government then led by Theresa May chose to “sit on the information and avoid alienating the incoming American president”.

Steele says he had briefed May before but “she was clearly worried about alienating Britain’s most powerful ally. It was cowardly behavior, in my opinion, and wrong. There is being close to the United States, and then there is being close to the United States to the extent that one’s own national security is jeopardized.”

Steele discusses the reported occasion in May 2017 when Trump shared “top secret intelligence”, allegedly about an Israeli asset working inside the terrorist group Isis, with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. Sources, Steele says, believe Russia told Iran, which tipped off Isis, leading to the death of the asset.

Steele then cites his “impeccable source” saying Trump took documents concerning British naval secrets to Mar-a-Lago. He also says the British government knew of links between Trump and Moscow before his intervention, as the Australian government reported activities involving a Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos, in 2016.

A long-delayed British report on Russian influence was published in 2020, by which time May had been succeeded as prime minister by Boris Johnson. The Labour party, then in opposition, said the report authors, a cross-party group of MPs and peers, had shown “the scale of the shortcomings of the government’s response to maintaining our national security in the face of what is clearly a growing and significant threat from Russia”.

Steele calls May’s decision to stay close to Trump “at best, denial and at worst, irresponsible. The British government had decided to pretend that Trump was a normal president-elect, that he had not been helped in his victorious election campaign by Russia, and that he and his team could be trusted with the most sensitive, life-and-death information that governments hold. As we later saw, they could not.”

Speaking to the Washington Post, which interviewed Steele this week, Trump’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said: “Any new information by this foreign agent who peddled the debunked Steele dossier should be wholly dismissed, and any media outlet that entertains anything he has to say is just the continuation of election interference intended to meddle in the campaign.”

Steele told the Post he had “weighed the risks – including the risk of harm to Trump” arising from publishing new unverified claims, such as that about British naval secrets allegedly taken to Mar-a-Lago.

But Steele added that he had decided it was in the public interest to do so, even “if the allegations I reference in the work are untrue”.