When I was an English literature undergraduate, many moons ago, a sleepy post-lunch Jane Austen seminar was rocked into sudden and glorious life when the professor suggested an alternative interpretation of Emma. She saw Austen’s novel not only as a tale of hubris and privilege – but as an unrequited queer love story. In her view, the eager-to-please Harriet Smith wasn’t just Emma’s friend, but something of a crush. My mind was blown.

Such thinking is the inspiration behind our new series, Rethinking the Classics. These articles take works of the literary and artistic canon that many of us first learned about in school or at university and offer new ways to understand them. In one example, the heroes of Homer’s Iliad are interpreted as eco-warriors battling to protect nature. In another, Picasso’s Guernica is better understood when read as a comic strip. And living through COVID offers one author a fresh understanding of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, a novel forged during another global pandemic.

A team of academic researchers, lawyers and journalists from 16 European countries has exposed a huge lobbying campaign aimed at gutting a proposed EU-wide restriction on the use of “forever chemicals”. We hear from a professor of criminology who is part of the group on how they conducted their Europe-wide investigation into the chemicals.

Plus, what we learned from Donald Trump’s first day back in office.