Time for a fresh start

The artwork on this week’s cover, titled Fresh Start, provides a wonderful and essential message. It was created by a detainee at HM Prison and Young Offender Institution Low Newton and features in a new exhibition called Almost Home from the UK’s best-known prison arts charity Koestler Arts.

Also inside

• How to make work work – with employee numbers falling, we take an in-depth look at that the year ahead has in store for Britain’s workforce
• The Seed of the Sacred Fig is the defiant response to authoritarianism that has the Iranian government on the run. We talk to its director Mohammad Rasoulof
• The promise of punk thrills lured First Dates maître d’ Fred Sirieix to the UK, he recalls in a Letter To My Younger Self
• Jason Isaacs teases the return of The White Lotus and explains why a tennis racket is always first in his suitcase
• For Valentine’s Day we investigate whether there’s any link between political persuasion and bedroom fantasies
• And things are on the up for Nottingham vendor Steve who’s now hoping that Notts County get promoted

Plus much more!

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