On 30 July 1963, Kim Philby's defection from MI6 to the Soviet Union was made public. In 2016, the BBC broadcast previously unseen footage of his lecture to Stasi operatives in which he revealed the secrets behind his treachery.

"Almost all my life I have spent trying to avoid publicity of any kind," says Kim Philby in a 1981 video unearthed by the BBC from the archives of East Germany's spy service. It's something of an understatement. Philby was a British double agent whose defection to the Soviet Union was made public on 30 July 1963. In the video, he is seen giving a seminar to Stasi operatives on how to succeed at espionage.

As the BBC's former security correspondent Gordon Corera explained in his 2016 report on the previously unseen footage, "Philby offers a masterclass in betrayal, from his recruitment by Soviet spies after Cambridge to his joining Britain's secret service MI6, whose secrets he stole." It is the only known video in which the leading member of the so-called Cambridge Five KGB spy ring discusses his betrayal – a rare recording that is revealing on many levels.

"I'm looking back on my career in the enemy camp, this 30-year career in the enemy camp," he says in the grainy video, standing behind a lectern in thick-rimmed glasses and a suit and tie. "Every evening, I left the office with a big briefcase full of reports which I had written myself, full of files taken out of the actual archives. I used to hand them to my contact in the evening. Next morning I'd get the file back, the contents having been photographed, and take them back early in the morning and put the files back in their place. That I did regularly, year in, year out."

As part of a circle that also featured Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, Philby passed British state secrets to the Kremlin during World War Two and the Cold War, including the period when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were allies. Yet there has sometimes been a rose-tinted view of their double-crossing, according to Antonia Senior, the author of Stalin's Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire.

From Jacob Elordi in Ridley Scott's post-apocalyptic thriller, to a wacky NYC romcom starring Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro, here are the films to watch at the cinema and stream at home this month.

In most ways, One Night Only is a typical romantic comedy. It revolves around two flirtatious and absurdly attractive young New Yorkers (Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner), and it's directed by Will Gluck, who made such Hollywood romcoms as Friends with Benefits and Anyone but You. But Travis Braun's script has a bizarre twist: it's set in an alternate reality where it's illegal for single people to have sex, except on one night a year. Nicknamed "The Purge, but for sex", the concept has prompted much online debate about whether it's a great idea for a romcom or an absolutely terrible one. "If you allow yourself to buy into the absurdity of it, you'll have a good time," advised Turner in The Hollywood Reporter. "Don't be a stickler for the rules, or go watch something else. Go watch a documentary."

Released on 7 August in the US and Canada and on 28 August in the UK and Ireland

Eli Roth, the director of Cabin Fever and Hostel, is back to dish out another scoop of gory, low-budget horror – and Ice Cream Man looks like his most gleefully excessive film yet. Ari Millen plays the titular purveyor of frozen treats, a mystery man who drives around an all-American town, selling ice cream that turns children into homicidal maniacs. So if you enjoyed the climax of Weapons, when the children become a pack of feral predators, then Ice Cream Man could be the guilty pleasure for you. "I want this to be the craziest film I've ever made," said Roth in Geek Vibes Nation. It's like The Birds but with children... I mean, it's totally insane."

Released on 6 August in Australia and New Zealand, and on 7 August in the US, the UK, Canada and Ireland

Ridley Scott is 88, but the legendary director is busier than ever. In the past five years, he has made The Last Duel, House of Gucci, Napoleon and Gladiator II, and now he's directed The Dog Stars, a post-apocalyptic thriller adapted from Peter Heller's novel. Among the survivors of a near-future flu epidemic are a pilot (Jacob Elordi), a medic (Margaret Qualley) and an ex-marine (Josh Brolin) – although you could say that none of them knows more about surviving than Scott himself. "He's been plugging into cinema his whole life – it literally pumps through his blood," said Elordi on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. "That's what keeps the engine running. I'm literally watching cinema sustain a life."

Released on 26 to 28 August internationally

Anthony Bourdain, who died in 2018, was a rock star in the world of food and travel-writing, so it's appropriate that he should get a rock star origin-story film. Inspired by his bestselling memoir, Kitchen Confidential, Tony is set in the mid-1970s when he was a college drop-out working in a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It's directed by Matt Johnson (Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie), and it features Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) as the 19-year-old Bourdain, alongside Antonio Banderas as the chef who mentors him, Leo Woodall as a friend, and Emilia Jones as his girlfriend. Sessa is the ideal actor to play Bourdain, Johnson said in Entertainment Weekly. "[They are] both from Jersey, both sent to private school, but didn't fit in, both restless and searching… More than any movie I've ever made, this film was a partnership with an actor."

Released on 7 August in the US, and on 14 August in the UK and Ireland

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma was the best reviewed film at this year's Cannes Film Festival. A surreal postmodern comedy from Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), it stars Hannah Einbinder (Hacks) as a queer director who is hired to revive a Friday-the-13th-like slasher franchise – and to make it politically acceptable to liberal young viewers. Her big idea is to hire the actress (Gillian Anderson) who was the star of the first film. But it so happens that the actress now lives as a recluse in the very summer camp where that film was shot, so the boundaries between reality and fiction begin to blur. "A steamy stew of sex, death, VHS and junk food, Schoenbrun's delirious third film is their most accomplished, most persuasive and most playful movie yet," says Jessica Kiang in Variety.

Released on 7 August in the US and Canada, and on 21 August in the UK

The Jurassic Park/ World films are usually set in exotic locations, so it's intriguing to see a different kind of dinosaurs-v-humans scenario. Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) and produced by JJ Abrams (Lost, Star Wars: The Force Awakens), The End of Oak Street stars Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as ordinary suburban parents in an ordinary suburban neighbourhood. The only trouble is that this neighbourhood has somehow been teleported to a primeval wilderness. Will garden tools be enough to fend off the ravenous reptiles? "I love the Jurassic movies as much as anyone, but those films, for the most part, take place in these beautiful jungles, these distant islands," Abrams said in Empire. "David's whole approach here was the juxtaposition of the absolute mundane suburban family life and dinosaurs."

Released on 12 to 14 August internationally

Two friends smoke too much cannabis and then stumble into a world of dangerous crime. That's the outline of countless stoner comedies from Up in Smoke to Pineapple Express, but almost all of these films have something else in common: the friends in question are men. The Wrong Girls is one of the only female-led examples of the genre. Kristen Stewart (who is married to the film's writer-director, Dylan Meyer) and Alia Shawkat star as the slacker buddies who stumble across a consignment of an experimental new wonder drug. Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani provide the voices of their pet cats, who speak to them when they're hallucinating. "I kept making this joke during production that it was my memoir, which is very funny when you watch the movie because there's giant squids and telepathy and all kinds of other stuff in it," said Meyer in the film's press notes. "But it feels very autobiographical to me when I watch it." 

Released on 14 August in the US

Union County stars Will Poulter and Noah Centineo as two opioid-addicted brothers in rural Ohio who need to stay sober and hold down jobs if they want to keep out of prison. Poulter has been praised for his touchingly naturalistic performance, but the drama is authentic for other reasons, too: its debut writer-director, Adam Meeks, grew up in Ohio, and aside from Poulter and Centineo, almost all of the other people in the brothers' recovery programme are non-professional actors telling their own stories. "The film earns every emotional, lived-in development," says Chase Hutchinson in The Wrap, "instilling this slice-of-life portrait with such a quiet humanity that it can feel like you're sitting at the tables and in the meeting rooms along with all the characters." 

Released on 14 August in the US

Coyote vs Acme is a film we thought we'd never see. A Roger Rabbit-style mix of live-action actors and 2D animated characters, it focuses on two Looney Tunes favourites, Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner. In the classic cartoons, Coyote kept buying disastrously faulty gadgets, so in the film he sues the company that sells them, with Will Forte as his lawyer. The unusual part is that the finished film was shelved three years ago by Warner Bros, as the studio chose to take a tax write-off rather than release it. (The same thing happened to another Warner Bros film, Batgirl.) But now at last Coyote vs Acme is being released by an independent company. Its screenwriter, Samy Burch, has commented that Wile E Coyote's never-say-die persistence was inspiring. "There's beauty in that – in trying even when things are not coming easily and when you've failed a hundred times before," she said in Empire.

Released on 20 to 28 August internationally

Simon Farnaby, the co-writer of Paddington 2 and Wonka, brings his eccentric humour to another treasure of British children's literature: The Magic Faraway Tree novels by Enid Blyton. In Farnaby's modern version of Blyton's stories, an inventor and her husband, played by Clare Foy and Andrew Garfield, move to a remote cottage in the countryside to give their three children a break from the internet. The children then discover a tree that has portals to other worlds in its branches, and they encounter colourful characters including Silky (Nicola Coughlan), Moonface (Nonso Anozie), Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning), and the villainous Dame Snap (Rebecca Ferguson). "It's a smart update of the Blyton stories for the smartphone era," says Phil de Semlyen in Time Out. "With a cracking cast, thoughtful message and the odd rollicking adventure, it's a fun family movie that'll finally give you permission to switch off the wi-fi." 

Released on 21 August in the US and Canada

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Caro Claire Burke's debut novel Yesteryear is the book of the season – and quite likely the year, too. Here's why this satirical novel about tradwives and womanhood in the US has everybody talking.

Take a quick scan of the hotel pool, beach or airplane this summer and there's a good chance you'll see someone immersed in the pages of Yesteryear.

Caro Claire Burke's debut novel was published in April to great fanfare. It is the story of a successful "tradwife" influencer who finds herself transported back to the 1800s. Buzz about the book has only snowballed from there. It's spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and topped the Sunday Times hardback fiction chart in the UK. 

It's not just that people are buying it in droves – they're also talking about it en masse. On Bookstagram and BookTok, the literary nooks of social media, Yesteryear takes are ubiquitous. In June the novel topped the new BookTok chart, meaning it was the most talked-about title on the platform. In group chats and bookclubs, readers are fiercely debating its merit.

Yesteryear's protagonist is Natalie Heller Mills, a 32-year-old married mother of five (soon to be six) who documents her family's apparently idyllic life on their 500-acre Idaho farm to millions of social media followers. Her character mirrors the real-life internet subculture of women who promote and imitate traditional gender roles, where men are the breadwinners and women their subordinates, prioritising raising children and housekeeping. 

Natalie bakes sourdough, home-schools her children, drinks milk fresh from her cow, collects eggs from her chickens ("the ladies") each morning – all with a gleaming smile on her face. At least, for as long as the camera is rolling. Natalie's perfect life is a carefully constructed façade, but it's a compelling and lucrative one.

From an ingenious home with guest annexe attached, to a micro house in Tokyo that opens like a shell, and a home for both cats and humans – here are 10 innovative Japanese dwellings.

The most inventive homes in Japan are modest in scale, but ambitious in what they aim to do. Architects there are offering "the most precise and inventive thinking about living now," according to François-Luc Giraldeau, editor of the book A House in Japan: Lessons in Living.

"That matters today because much of the world is facing the same questions Japan has been dealing with for decades," he tells the BBC. "How to live well with less space, fewer resources and greater environmental pressure."

And there is a deceptive simplicity about the best Japanese dwellings. "What looks minimal is usually the result of exacting decisions about proportion, material, light and joinery – there's an enormous amount of craft beneath what appears effortless. Good design isn't about having more; it's about making what exists work harder." Here is our pick of 10 Japanese homes that reflect these skills and create solutions.

"How much space does one truly need to live well?" asks architect Takeshi Hosaka of his practice and home, a compact nest with a footprint no larger than 10 sq m (108 sq ft) in Tokyo. This tiny site becomes the creative impetus for a home containing all the essentials: bathing, music, food, study and reflection. The house is defined by tall twin curved concrete shells that open to the sky, letting winter light flood in. Inside every surface has a purpose, with shelves carved into walls and counters extending outward. For Hosaka and his wife, their home encompasses "the infiniteness of small things".

Open plan takes on a whole new meaning in this design – inside, the living space is entirely open from top to bottom. IGArchitects removed the whole concept of walls in favour of floating floors as building blocks that separate living areas. The couple who live here "have learnt its rhythm," Giraldeau tells the BBC. "With horizontal space so scarce, architects have no choice but to think in section, not just in plan, to invent new forms of domestic movement." Recalling the work of artist MC Escher, the floor plates sit at differing heights and depths, hovering and interlocking throughout, acting as dividers, storage and space. Floor-to-ceiling windows let light flow in, while subtle screening affords privacy to the bathroom and bedroom.

"Sufficiency can be designed with dignity" Giraldeau says. "It essentially asks: how much space do we need to live well?" In the West, bigger is often considered better, but in Japan, design seeks out ways of living well with less – and on this corner plot of just 30 sq m (323 sq ft), architects Kominoru Design have developed a three-storey home. The upper floor holds a rooftop terrace; inside, a bathtub is tucked into an angled wall, while tall windows in the roof circulate air. Trees planted above the eaves on a raised second-floor garden skilfully weave a tiny plot into a beautiful home.

In an ageing country where pets now outnumber children and often stand in for extended family, architect Tan Yamanouchi designed a home from the perspective of his two cats, alongside his wife and himself – a decision that produced a radical, egalitarian house. At its centre is a spiral staircase with 23 levels calibrated to a cat's stride. Like branches from a tree, the bedroom, studio, kitchen, dining room and bathroom all peel off from the stairs, providing a playful, equitable home for cats and humans alike.

Wedged into the intersection of a major road and a railway line, this apartment draws on creative imagination – fundamental to Japanese design – to shape a calming, expansive home built around the concept of engawa, the transitional space between exterior and interior. A 40-sq-m (431-sq-ft) balcony serves as the engawa, while a butterfly shoji (traditional room divider) tarp, made from dual layers of translucent fabric threaded with steel pipes, adjusts to the light, extending out to filter the intense summer glare.

Resembling a stack of smart Lego bricks, this playful family home is tucked into the backstreets of Tokyo's Meguro district, on a busy shopping street. Designed by architects Onishimaki + Hyakudauki, it is built from a series of stacked cubes. An annex – the "hut" – juts off the main tower and, thanks to its proximity to the street, doubles as a spare room or studio. Behind it, a tower of cubes rises into a five-storey home. A spiral staircase winds up from the ground floor, through bedrooms, a living space and a playroom at the top. An exterior staircase links out to a second-floor shower.

"This apartment isn't a bespoke standalone house, but a standard 1970s 3LDK apartment made radical," Giraldeau tells the BBC. The acronym LDK – living, dining, kitchen – describes the open-plan format that became standard during Japan's postwar urbanisation, with the number denoting bedrooms. Mass-produced for a booming urban workforce, these units are ubiquitous and often generic. Design firm Roovice creates individuality and zoning by using colour, exposed concrete, flexible lighting, custom storage and a cobalt-blue floor strip. "The canon of Japanese interiors is material-led, not colour-led," Giraldeau explains. "Here, colour is structural rather than decorative – it organises movement, connects rooms, and turns a standard unit into something personal."

Inventive thinking is behind this home that was hemmed in on three sides in a tightly packed Tokyo neighbourhood. Keen to increase the light, Yuko Nagayama & Associates with Shohei Yoshida + Associates looked upwards for solutions. They suspended a double fabric roof in a catenary curve, in effect a shoji screen, "Traditional Japanese architecture relied on diffused light," says Giraldeau. They scaled this up to a roof, which lights, ventilates and insulates, while trees grow through the atrium beneath. 

Built on kyōsei, the Japanese concept of symbiosis or synergy, this house, designed by READ & Architects, connects two buildings via a glass corridor. Designed for a newly retired couple, one side holds the main living space and master bedroom, while the other offers guest accommodation – with the option of housing a live-in caregiver in future. "In Japan, one of the world's oldest societies, architecture has learned to anticipate care rather than react to it," Giraldeau tells the BBC. Nestled in the foothills of Mount Asama, volcanic stone gardens and firs encircle the home, mirroring the forests of Karuizawa beyond the windows.

This family home was reimagined by Taichi Mitsuya & Associates as an extension of the city. Carefully woven into the Kawasaki neighbourhood of narrow streets and waterways, the house is open to light, air and the adjacent urban rhythms, while maintaining a sense of privacy. A 30-foot skylit void, floored in steel grating, floods the interior with a greenhouse-like glow. For the family of four who live here, sliding partitions cleverly blur indoor and outdoor life – below is an airy veranda, and above is a garden terrace.

A House in Japan: Lessons in Living is published by Gestalten.

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A decade ago, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's dark comedy about a witty but pain-filled young woman premiered – and became a cultural phenomenon.

Ten years ago today, Fleabag burst on to the-then online-only UK channel, BBC Three. A barnstorming opening told viewers exactly what they could expect from this one-of-a-kind series: within the first 55 seconds, the main character narrates having sex with a man she's just met - ending with a jaw-dropping punchline.

The work of actor/writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag started out as a sketch in the London Storytelling Festival in 2012, and evolved into a 2013 one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, before Waller-Bridge then adapted it into a TV series. The show, which ran for two seasons and aired on Prime Video internationally, is now regularly cited as "one of the greatest TV series of all time", and won Waller-Bridge a whole host of awards, including Baftas, Emmys and Golden Globes.

A thoroughly contemporary tale, it undoubtedly changed the TV landscape as we know it now. Here's how:

Film and TV commissioners were shaken awake by the roaring success of Fleabag, and, alongside Lena Dunham's Girls, which premiered a few years earlier, it proved that not only was there a vital need for more women's voices in the traditionally male-dominated industry – there was a big appetite for them too.

In the UK, especially, it paved the way for other complex and edgy female-created shows like Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You, Aisling Bea's This Way Up, Big Mood starring Bridgerton's Nicola Coughlan, and author-turned-screenwriter Candice Carty-Williams's Queenie. We've got the "genius" of Waller-Bridge to thank for this wave, says Alice Redman, editor at Broadcast Intelligence: "There's a direct legacy of comedies about complicated, emotionally rich and challenging female characters that you can see across the TV landscape following Fleabag, in both comedy and drama."

Waller-Bridge is also directly responsible for championing the career of the most high-profile female film auteur in the UK, Wuthering Heights and Saltburn director Emerald Fennell. With her first post-Fleabag show, 2018's spy thriller Killing Eve, Waller Bridge passed the showrunner reins on to a variety of different women, including Fennell, who oversaw the second series. 

Fleabag showcased a very particular type of heroine that had rarely been seen on screen: erratic, chaotic, reeling from the death of her mother and her best friend, and filling the void with alcohol and one-night-stands. Certainly in the UK, female lead characters on TV had rarely been allowed to be this defiantly flawed or "messy" before.

However, there can be too much of a good thing and some critics have since challenged the rise of the "messy woman" archetype that Fleabag arguably inspired. Writing in The Guardian in 2022, Rachel Aroesti claimed that "the messy millennial woman" had become "TV's most tedious trope", as it "migrated from a bracingly realistic proxy to something fast approaching a reductive stereotype, monopolising comic portrayals of the female experience". She cited post-Fleabag shows like Everything I Know About Love, Feel Good and I Hate Suzie as adhering to this trend. 

But Redman says that it shouldn't be underestimated how the series' depiction of its protagonist pushed TV in a better direction: "It feels slightly reductive to label it as a 'messy woman' story when there's a reason why it became so popular. Before Fleabag you can count on one hand the series that reflected a millennial experience of women trying to figure out who they are. Fleabag is a 'messy woman' but the story is a lot deeper than that because life is also messy." 

Fleabag is also regularly cited as a key proponent of the in-vogue "trauma plot", in which a character's problems are all explained away by the revealing of a past trauma. Again, though, not all critics have been fans of this device: in a celebrated 2021 essay for The New Yorker, Parul Sehgal made "the case against the trauma plot", citing Fleabag alongside Ted Lasso and Marvel's Wandavision among her TV examples and asking: "Does this trope deepen characters, or flatten them into a set of symptoms?"

Scriptwriter Amelia O'Loughlin sticks up for this kind of storytelling however: "I do take that view that there can be too much self-analysis that isn't interesting. But equally, we're shaped by our trauma. We're shaped by the things that have happened to us. So I think in a way, quite organically, the evolution of the messy woman has since become 'okay, she can be messy, but we're also gonna need some real plot here'. I think that that probably is a true and apt evolution for the TV world."

One of the most striking elements of Fleabag was the fact she constantly broke the fourth wall, talking in asides to the audience and, alongside witty one-liners, expressing her dark innermost fears and desires. Since then, a number of shows have broken the fourth wall in a way that has evoked Phoebe Waller-Bridge's creation – most recently Netflix university dramedy Vladimir, with Rachel Weisz. But this use of the device hasn't always been a hit: the 2022 Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion, was heavily derided for having its 18th Century heroine, played by Dakota Johnson, talk to the audience in what was seen as a Fleabag-esque "gimmick". Indeed, O'Loughlin says that when pitching ideas to TV development execs now: "I'm always told, 'Avoid the flashback and breaking the fourth wall as much as you possibly can'". 

However, Fleabag had a particular reason for its heroine's style of address, which can be traced back to the fact it started life as a theatre production, O'Loughlin explains: "I think that artists that come from a theatrical background frequently break the fourth wall. It's been a vehicle since Shakespeare. I think that can also be a bit trope-y, and that can also be a slightly lazier option. But in the same breath, I will say there are so many moments in my own writing where I'm like, 'I really kind of want for my protagonist to just have a word with the audience'."

At the time of Fleabag's second series, The Guardian’s Ellen E Jones praised the show's "undeniable genius", but added "this isn't a criticism… but it is for posh girls", while Huck's Aimee Cliff noted that Waller-Bridge has baronets and an MP in her family tree, adding: "Waller-Bridge isn't all of us, and Fleabag definitely isn't. It's a very good show about a posh white lady. It's okay to frame it that way, while also acknowledging that we need more stories than that."

Ten years on, O'Loughlin thinks this still rings true: " I think that Fleabag opened the floodgates for your 'middle-upper class but troubled women' stories. It was like, 'sure, we're looking for diversity in our voices, but it's okay because you're female, so that's diverse enough'. But I would have liked to have seen more about the type of woman who experiences all that Fleabag experiences, but hasn't got the safety net that she does."

However Redman believes that "as Phoebe Waller-Bridge said herself, it 'undermines the story' to perceive it as being about or for posh people". In a 2019 interview on the How To Fail Podcast, Waller-Bridge added that "I like to think that whatever life I'd lived, wherever I'd been born or brought up, I would still have written if I had been given the encouragement. That's the thing that I care about, encouraging people to do it."

What's more, in the past decade, there have been positive moves to champion female voices from across society – see, in the UK, the Bafta-winning Alma's Not Normal starring and written by working class comic Sophie Willan, Such Brave Girls by showrunner and actor Kat Sadler or Welsh coming-of-age series In My Skin, by Kayleigh Llewellyn.

At this stage, O'Loughlin says, "people don't want another Fleabag. Commissioners say: 'Let's not make the same kind of material', because it's 'been there done that', so Fleabag is both a product of its time and a defining moment in TV".

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Argentina's iconic first lady died in July 1952. Sixty years on, the BBC looked back at her cadaver's bizarre disappearance – and its 16-year journey around the globe.

A few hours after the death of Eva Perón, on 26 July 1952, Dr Pedro Ara got to work. The renowned Spanish anatomist was tasked with embalming the Argentinian first lady's body in the same way the Russians had preserved the remains of Lenin and Stalin. The corpse of Evita, as she was affectionately known, was kept in the Ministry of Labour building, where a monument to workers was due to be built, with a glass coffin at its base that would be her final resting spot.

Warning: This article contains details that some may find distressing. 

Yet three years later, in September 1955, her husband, President Juan Perón, was deposed in a military coup and went into exile. The new regime decided to steal Eva Perón's body – setting off a macabre 16-year odyssey. Her cadaver would be held at the Centre for Military Intelligence, stored in a van, buried in Milan, and transported to Madrid before it was eventually returned to Buenos Aires to be laid to rest in a heavily fortified crypt.

After Eva Perón died of cervical cancer at the age of 33, her husband had political reasons for having her embalmed. Her poor rural background and her charitable works as first lady had won her fervent working-class support. "So he wanted to preserve that, [by] preserving the body," Flavia Fiorucci, a historian of Peronism, told the BBC in 2012. "It also had to do with the importance that Perón and Peronism gave to symbols, and Evita was a symbol."

That was clear in the weeks after her death. Dr Ara was able to embalm Evita's body in a lifelike state using a paraffin and glycerine injection technique. Two million people visited her coffin as she lay in state in Congress for 14 days, the devotion she'd inspired while alive continuing after her death.

As the 2026 World Cup draws to a close, the BBC rounds up some of the most stunning photos captured from the tournament – and reveals their similarities to classic works of art.

Among the countless remarkable photos captured by international sports journalists since the Fifa World Cup 2026 began on 11 June, a select set has succeeded in searing itself into cultural consciousness. Why do some extraordinary photographs endure while others are quickly forgotten? 

Perhaps the most memorable images manage to gain traction because we feel we've seen them before – or some semblance of them. They echo patterns of posture and gesture long fixed in popular imagination by artists, from antiquity to modern times, whose paintings and sculptures have shaped the way perceive the world. What follows are 10 of the most enduring photos to have been captured during the World Cup, alongside the masterpieces they recall and reinvigorate.   

This image captures the collective focus of a stampede of England and Mexico players, led by Harry Kane and Jesús Gallardo, as it competes for the ball in Round 16 in Mexico City on 5 July. It appears almost choreographed in its measured momentum. Suspending the scrum's static acceleration, Julian Finney's photo recalls the velocity and vectors of a modernist masterpiece: Umberto Boccioni's Futurist formation, The Charge of the Lancers, 1916.

There is an unmistakably heavyweight knockout quality to Nathan Denette's dramatic photo of Ghana's Ernest Nuamah colliding with Panama's César Blackman in Toronto on 17 June. Here, the ball appears to be less the object of the players' efforts than the suspended site of climactic impact, as Blackman absorbs the full force of the body blow. For an instant, the beautiful game of football blurs into the sweet science of boxing. It echoes the crumpling, cruciform collapse of boxer Jack Dempsey, falling through the ropes after a punch by Luis Firpo in George Bellow's most famous painting.

Hands on cheeks, his mouth frozen open in a distended shriek of anguish, Amel Emric's affecting photo of a young Bosnia-Herzegovina fan watching in despair on 2 July as his country plays the United States, has familiar parallels. It appears almost deliberately to parody the history of horrified howls in art from Caravaggio's defeated Medusa to Edvard Munch's avatar of existential angst. 

Witness the rotational torque of Morocco's Ismael Saibari, celebrating his winning penalty against the Netherlands in the Round of 32. The photo, by Carl Recine, seemed not so much snapped by a camera than chiselled by a sculptor. Hips sprung and shirt spiralled like a weapon, this is the instant after David in Bernini's famous sculpture of the giant slayer has released the full fulcral force of his lethal sling.

Justin Setterfield's quasi-abstract photo of Norway fans performing their rowing chant during the Group I match between Norway and Senegal on 22 June is a vibrant mosaic of communal enthusiasm. The rapturous rhythmicity of reds recalls Paul Klee's resplendent painting, Rose Garden, 1920, in which the joyous energy of a place is portrayed as a pulsing engine of synchronised scarlet strokes.

The eccentric instinct to elevate footballers to iconic status isn't only the passion of pretentious art critics. This is clear from Thomas Coex's photo of Portuguese fans waving a banner of Ronaldo reimagined in the glorified guise of a venerated saint. Fully kitted out in the paraphernalia of canonisation (including a luminous corona for a halo, green mantle, sacred staff, chalice and scroll), the portrait of "St Ronaldo" has been meticulously crafted to echo the contours of St Jude Thaddeus – the patron saint of lost causes.

Allow your mind for a moment to delete the trapped football from between the converging heads in Mark Terrill's photo of South Africa's Sphephelo Sithole and Canada's Jonathan David. They were moshing for possession on 28 June in Los Angeles, appearing to be locked in an intense dance. At once individual yet fused, colliding yet diverging, their fiercely focused physiques call to mind countless depictions of tangoed intertwinement in cultural history.

Buoyant both in body and spirit, Lionel Messi, as captured by photographer Carlos Barria, is hurled heavenward by his teammates after Argentina's defeat of Egypt in the Round of 16 on 7 July in Atlanta. The flung finesse of the figure's ascent recalls Tiepolo's Ascension of Christ, c 1745-50, where the wonder of devotees, as much as the summons of God, is responsible for the miraculous levitation.

There's a fine line between concentration and consternation. The expression on Marc Cucurella's face in a photo by Fernando Llano as the Spaniard fights against Uruguay's Agustín Canobbio in Mexico on 26 June, is an object lesson in unflinching focus. The intensity of Cucurella's stare rhymes richly with the penetrating gaze of Gustav Courbet's famous 1843 self-portrait.

Lars Baron's photo of Desire Doue in despair after France's defeat by Spain in the semi-final on 15 July was especially affecting. The image captures Doue retreating behind the blue veil of his upturned jersey. For a moment, the elastic fabric, tugged taut against the features of his masked face, alchemises Doue into sculpted monumentality. The eerie effect inverts the unsettling dynamic of a genre of marble busts from the 19th Century in which skilled sculptors managed to make stone itself seem as sinuous and translucent as silken veils. 

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As the Nazis were advancing in Europe, President Roosevelt invited King George VI and his consort for a visit to his country home. It was the first time that a British monarch had set foot on US soil. Over hot dogs and beers, the conversations that took place helped shape the course of history – as a new play explores.

In early 1939, US President Franklin D Roosevelt followed events in Europe with growing dismay. In March, the Nazi army invaded Czechoslovakia, shattering the Munich Agreement brokered a mere six months previously. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's bid for "peace in our time" had come to nothing.

Roosevelt, 57, was certain Britain would soon be forced to stand up militarily to Adolf Hitler, and the US's aid in the armed struggle would be vital. But the president knew, also, that a majority of his fellow citizens were strict isolationists – they wanted nothing to do with another European war.

His solution? Roosevelt – or FDR as he was widely known – invited the young King George VI and his consort Queen Elizabeth to his beloved country home in upstate New York. A reigning British monarch had never before visited the US. The president envisioned a casual, "just folks" occasion to demonstrate to Americans how the royal couple were not grand remote figures, but friendly representatives of a democratic nation that deserved support. 

The focal point of the weekend visit was to be an outdoor picnic in the grounds of the Roosevelt estate, at which hot dogs – that decidedly un-regal US summer favourite – would be served. The historic meet-up is the subject of a new play, Springwood, at London's Hampstead Theatre, praised as a "timely tale of a British monarch's mission to the US" by The Guardian. So how did this moment help shape history – and why does it resonate particularly right now? 

Playwright Richard Nelson chose as his title the official name of the house in the Hudson Valley village of Hyde Park where the president was born in 1882, and where his elderly mother still resided at the time of the royal visit. Nelson, who lives nearby, previously wrote a screenplay about that long-ago June weekend. It was made into a movie – Hyde Park on the Hudson, starring Bill Murray as the president – released in 2013. The playwright was inspired to return to the material because "today we are in a somewhat similar situation as in 1939, what with the war in Ukraine," Nelson tells the BBC. "Then, as now, there is a large element in the United States which is isolationist." 

In his movie script the action was narrated by Daisy Suckley, FDR's distant cousin and close friend. Nelson's new play focuses more tightly on the political – and emotional – stakes for the two couples, royal and presidential.

As Christopher Nolan's epic blockbuster starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland arrives in cinemas – here are the key takeaways from the film.

One thing I'd never considered before seeing The Odyssey: it was quite foul-smelling inside that Trojan horse. No detail is too small and no action too big for Christopher Nolan's film, epic in its scope and ambition. 

You may think of Homer's centuries-old poem as the cornerstone of Western literature or as a dreaded school assignment. Possibly both. But Nolan's extravagant adaptation is decidedly more an action-adventure blockbuster than a classics lesson. 

Stress and mental exhaustion aren't new – in medieval times, they were prevalent. And the wisdom of the Middle Ages about how to deal with burnout still rings surprisingly true today.

The symptoms, John Cassian noted, were always the same. Weariness and hopelessness, a longing to be anywhere but work, and brain fog – "a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind" that left his colleagues feeling idle and useless and longing for the "solace of sleep".

If you've ever suffered burnout, exhaustion or depression, you might be familiar with at least some of these feelings, and you may assume that these afflictions are unique to the pressures of the 21st Century. But Cassian was writing in the 5th Century AD, and his intended audience were not modern-day executives, but early Christians who had become exhausted by their spiritual labours.

Could such accounts shine a light on our modern malaise, and even suggest a cure? That's the argument of historian Peter Jones's new book, Self-Help from the Middle Ages: A Journey into the Medieval Mind, which offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways that "therapist priests" – Jones's term – would guide their flocks out of spiritual anguish.

His research reveals just how common feelings of exhaustion have been throughout history – a recognition that may itself provide comfort for any of us facing a dark night of the soul. "There's so much wisdom in the Middle Ages," Jones says. We've already seen a proliferation of "lifestyle philosophy" books mining the works of the ancient Stoics, after all – maybe it's high time to take a leaf out of some medieval manuscripts.

Jones was inspired to write the book after his own crisis – the "coldest winter of my life". For reasons that he still finds hard to fathom, he had accepted a role as Chair of History at the University of Tyumen in Siberia. The temperatures were so low that he lost all feeling in his legs after spending just 20 minutes outside. He was struggling with the language and desperately missing his family in Dublin. "I was supposed to be researching and planning my lessons, to be getting on with my life," he writes. "But I couldn't bring myself to do anything at all."