“Podcast sloplords” are flooding the zone with AI-generated podcasts. By one count, almost 40% of new podcasts are written by AI chatbots and presented by “AI voice synthesizers [that] can sound eerily humanlike”.

Double Tour de France winner makes his debut when race begins on Friday and is the outstanding favourite for victory in Rome

Jonas Vingegaard’s bid to complete a rare Grand Tour grand slam by winning the 2026 Giro d’Italia begins in Bulgaria on Friday when the double Tour de France winner makes his debut in the Italian race.

Vingegaard, the winner of the 2022 and 2023 Tours de France, has been eclipsed by the achievements of Tadej Pogacar – winner this season of nine races in 11 days of racing – but is the outstanding favourite for victory in Rome on 31 May.

This 15th-century royal romp of intrigue and courtly conspiracy is given extra charismatic verve by John Hollingworth’s rambunctious narration

It is 1483 and 10-year-old John Collan is living on a farm outside Oxford with his father, Will, and waging war on an aggressive goat that keeps trampling him. His mother is long dead and his older twin brothers, Oliver and Tom, have left home to begin apprenticeships. One morning John overhears the dairy maid Jennot discussing how Edward Plantagenet and his younger brother Richard, sons of the late King Edward IV, have been imprisoned in the Tower of London by their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Later, a well-dressed man arrives on a chestnut horse for a meeting with his father. John learns that the man is his benefactor who has paid for him to be tutored. “A bright future!” Will tells his son. “But secret for now.”

A dramatic imagining of the true story of the royal impostor Lambert Simnel, Jo Harkin’s novel tells of a farmboy who is told that he is Edward V, 17th Earl of Warwick, rightful heir to the English throne and the elder prince in the tower. Having been tutored in great literature and courtly ways, our protagonist becomes a hapless pawn in the games of ambitious conspirators and is sent to Ireland where he becomes the figurehead of the Yorkist rebellion against the so-called usurper Henry VII.