Britain’s top male vlogger

If you’re over 20, and haven’t got teenage children, you may not have heard of Alfie Deyes. But the 23-year-old is one of Britain’s most successful vloggers, worth an estimated £4m. With his girlfriend and fellow Youtube star Zoe “Zoella” Suggs, he’s half of a media power couple. But he didn’t set out to be. Aged 15, when he began making videos in his bedroom in Brighton, “it wasn’t a job”, he told Anna Pointer in The Daily Telegraph. “There was no path to follow or goal to achieve. It’d never been done before.” Some might struggle to understand quite what it is Deyes does now. His videos notch up some 700,000 views a day, yet only show him (and sometimes Suggs) “doing random stuff” – shopping in Sainsbury’s, or playing with his dog. He thinks people like it because it’s “real” – yet the couple try to keep a degree of privacy, which isn’t easy. “People knock on our door,” he says. “Every single day, parents drive their kids over – and the adults are the ones who get annoyed when we say we won’t do pictures. They lift their kids onto the walls around our house, and throw stuff over. I’m always polite, but the way I see it, not even my mum turns up uninvited.”

Atwood on her dystopia

Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, says Hannah Betts in The Times. Three decades on, her novel, now adapted into a TV drama, has found a new relevance. People are drawing parallels between its dystopian vision and Trump’s America. Others see in it the Islamic State. The author insists that Gilead – the violent patriarchal theocracy that uses Islamist terrorism as a pretext to seize power – is not based on any one group. That said, everything in the story, about female oppression and state-sanctioned rape, has happened. “I put nothing in that people had not done at some time, in some place,” she says. “Men have been stealing women for 5,000 years. Look at Argentina under the generals, look at Hitler, look at the Soviet Union in its early phase… Just remember, nobody’s off the hook – except maybe the Quakers.”

Gordon Ramsay’s drive

Gordon Ramsay certainly has grit, says Natalie Whittle in the FT. He is now a multimillionaire with an interest in 30 restaurants worldwide. But he started at the bottom, and worked his way up through London’s best kitchens. Finally, in 1998, he opened a restaurant of his own – and funded it by selling his and his wife Tana’s first home. “You can imagine her thoughts: ‘Well, how long are we going to have to rent for?’” he says. “I didn’t shy away from [the pressure]. I needed that kind of drive, to make sure it had to work. It wasn’t maybe, or what if, or we’ll see what happens. No, this f***ing place is going to work and be one of the best restaurants in the country. I am going to eat, drink, sleep it.” She made her big-screen debut in the Australian film Flirting – and has worked in Hollywood for years. But Naomi Watts is actually British by birth. Her mother, Myfanwy “Miv” Roberts, was a model; her father, Peter “Puddie” Watts, was a sound engineer for Pink Floyd. They were young when Naomi was born, in 1968, and hip. One of the few surviving photos the actress has from that era shows her with her parents and the band on a beach in Saint-tropez. Yet it was a very different life she craved. “I’d had enough of cool,” she told Tom Lamont in The Guardian. “I didn’t want cool. I wanted my parents to wear three-piece suits and tweed, not leather pants and four-inch platform boots.” Her parents divorced in 1972: they reconciled in 1976, but just weeks later, her father died, apparently of a heroin overdose. The members of Pink Floyd helped the family financially (“It was kind that they did that”), but her life became yet more unsettled, as her mother moved from town to town trying to build a career. Each time, Watts had to start at a new school, and each time, she says, she’d stand on the edge of the playground, and try to work out what role – what accent – would get her admitted to the group. All perhaps useful training for the future, but that wasn’t a silver lining she perceived at the time. “I just remember always wanting to be something else. Quite sad, isn’t it?”