It is one of the most tantalising – and entertaining – puzzles in art, stretching from the Louvre to the Loire via, well, Norfolk. And our critic thinks he has just worked it out

Increased security after the recent heist has made the queues at the Louvre even slower, yet on this rainswept, very wintry morning, no one grumbles. After all, the Mona Lisa is waiting inside for all these tourists who have come from the world over. Leonardo da Vinci’s woman – swathed in dark cloth and silk, smiling enigmatically as she sits in front of a landscape of rocks, road and water – draws crowds like no other painting. But if the Mona Lisa can attract such attention fully clothed, what would the queues be like if she was nude?

Strangely, this is not just amusing speculation – because in 18th-century Britain, she was. An engraving issued by a publisher called John Boydell gave libertine Georgians the opportunity to hang “Joconda” in their boudoir. It must have been popular because many copies survive. This Mona Lisa sits in a chair with her hands crossed in front of a fading view of distant rock formations. And, like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, she smiles enigmatically. But there is one key difference. She is naked from the waist up.

Trump’s admission that he recognises no constraint outside his own morality was a horrifying moment of truth. It should galvanise all those who oppose him

For a serial liar, Donald Trump can be bracingly honest. We’ve known about the mendacity for years – consider the 30,573 documented falsehoods from the president’s first term, culminating in the big lie, his claim to have won the 2020 election – but the examples of bracing candour are fresher. This week both began and ended with the US president speaking the shocking truth.

At a press conference to celebrate his capture of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump announced that from now on the US would “run” that country, before moving in the very next breath to Venezuela’s oil. There was no pious talk of democracy, scant mention even of the drug trafficking that earlier served as a pretext for military action. Instead, Trump said out loud what had once been a slogan on leftist placards in protest at past US interventions, admitting that it really was all about the oil. It was as transparent a revelation of Trump’s true motive as you could have asked for.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Guardian newsroom: Year One of Trumpism: Is Britain Emulating the US? On Wednesday 21 January 2026, join Jonathan Freedland, Tania Branigan and Nick Lowles as they reflect on the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

Amid an affordable housing crisis, renting a room from a friend can seem like the perfect solution. But without clear rules, it can lead to power imbalances, feuds and even unfair evictions …

When Rachel needed a place to live, Maya was only too happy to offer her spare room. What are friends for?

Rachel had recently returned to her home town to start afresh, having been made redundant. Maya, a childhood friend, owned her three-bedroom home, having been helped to buy it by her parents.

His brutal movies put Korean cinema on the map. Now the director of Oldboy is back with a blistering satire about a man driven to murder after redundancy

The Korean wave is being feted around the world right now but Park Chan-wook is not feeling too celebratory. From the outside, South Korea seems to be a well-oiled machine pumping out a stream of world-conquering pop music, cuisine, cars, cinema (especially the Oscar-winning Parasite) and TV shows, as well as the Samsung flat-screens to watch them on. But Park’s latest film, No Other Choice, bursts the balloon somewhat. It paints modern-day Korea as an unstable landscape of industrial decline, downsizing, unemployment and male fragility – with no KPop Demon Hunters coming to save the day.

“I did not mean it for it to be a realistic portrayal of Korea in 2025,” says Park, a serene, almost professorial 62-year-old. “I think it’s more accurate to view it as a satire on capitalism.”

From the V&A to the Stranger Things finale, the pop icon still looms large – but with lower streaming figures than his peers, how many new listeners are discovering his music?

• ‘A perplexing, astonishing finale’: world pays tribute to David Bowie a decade after his death

When David Bowie died on 10 January 2016, such was the scale of media coverage and public mourning that one would have presumed his music would be everywhere for ever, elevated as he was, to misquote Smash Hits, to the position of the People’s Dame. It was briefly – Starman reached No 18, and Space Oddity No 24 – but then it wasn’t.

Each year, Forbes compiles a posthumous celebrity rich list. Bowie appeared in 2016, ranked at No 11 with estimated earnings of $10.5m (£7.8m), and again in 2017, in the same position but with earnings of $9.5m (£7m). This was unsurprising given the enormous spike in interest there is in the immediate aftermath of a superstar’s death. Yet he didn’t appear in the Forbes list again until 2022, when he was at No 3 with earnings of $250m (£195m) – the highest-ranked musician that year – but that was almost all attributable to the sale of his music publishing rights to Warner Chappell.

An afterlife sitcom, an angry penguin, tossed salad and scrambled eggs, and a Corby trouser press … our writers pick the shows they would happily watch on a loop for ever

I love every character and every aspect of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. There isn’t a weak link in the cast and they work together as seamlessly and apparently joyfully as you could wish.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calls protesters ‘vandals’ and ‘saboteurs’ and blames the US for instigating the unrest

Iran’s supreme leader has vowed that authorities will “not back down” in the face of a rapidly growing protest movement, setting the stage for an intensified violent crackdown on the second day of a nationwide internet shutdown.

Protests have raged in cities and towns across the country in recent days, posing a threat to the authority of the regime, which has been significantly weakened since the last large protest movement in the country in 2022. Another round of demonstrations was called for Friday night.

Met Office issues rare red warning as winter storm causes power cuts, travel disruption and school closures

Snow and ice are expected to grip much of the UK over the weekend as parts of the country continue to reel from the effects of Storm Goretti, which left thousands of people facing power cuts, school closures and travel chaos.

The storm brought winds of nearly 100mph after forecasters issued a rare red warning for “dangerous, stormy” winds in the south-west.

Spokesperson says limiting access to paying subscribers just makes ability to generate unlawful images a premium service

Downing Street has condemned the move by X to restrict its AI image creation tool to paying subscribers as insulting, saying it simply made the ability to generate explicit and unlawful images a premium service.

There has been widespread anger after the image tool for Grok, the AI element of X, was used to manipulate thousands of images of women and sometimes children to remove their clothing or put them in sexual positions.

Jacques Moretti arrested on Friday as lawyers representing families of victims say investigators are not moving fast enough

Like many young people across Switzerland, Kenzo Ronnow, a university student in Lausanne, slept in on 1 January after celebrating the new year.

But as he scrolled through his phone soon after waking, he saw the lead story of a foreign news website was about Switzerland.