Robert Redford, who has died at the age of 89, began as a blond bombshell at a time when American cinema favoured grit, then turned into a supremely assured director and unlikely keeper of the indie flame

• Robert Redford, giant of American cinema, dies aged 89 – news

• Robert Redford – a life in pictures

• Tributes paid to Robert Redford – latest updates

As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, it wasn’t cool for star actors to be good-looking. The style was more a scuffed, grizzled, bleary, sweaty, paunchy and shlubby realness. The fashion was for leading men like Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, Woody Allen. Even a very beautiful man like Paul Newman had a kind of rugged, daylit quality. But Robert Redford was very different. Here was a supremely beautiful movie star who went on to direct, produce and then be the guardian and gatekeeper of commercial-indie US cinema at his Sundance Institute. And he was always an outlier.

When movie audiences thrilled to George Roy Hill’s western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, they knew that in breakout star Redford they had an almost indecently attractive male, however much he might dress it down with buckskins and moustache, playing the devil-may-care outlaw Sundance Kid himself. His sardonic charisma and sexiness shone through. And when he cleaned himself up for other roles, teaming up again with Newman for the jazz age con-men caper The Sting in 1973, the effect was electric. Neatly trimmed and shaved, Robert Redford was just outrageously handsome, incandescently handsome, he was handsomeness on legs. His photograph was in the dictionary next to “handsome”.

Lowles has spent his entire adult life organising against fascism, facing countless threats as a result. He discusses the street confrontations of the 80s, foiling a murder plot, Nazi satanists – and the urgent need for optimism and action

In 1979, a 10-year-old Nick Lowles saw a hard-right party political broadcast. Born in Hounslow in London, he had moved to Shrewsbury when he was seven: “A very white town. There was a British Movement march soon after we moved up there.” Theirs was a “small-P political household”. His dad was a social worker, his mum worked for various charities. “She was from Mauritius, and now on the telly, the National Front were saying they were going to send people who weren’t born in Britain home in six months. I was petrified that my mum was going to get sent home.” The ambient racism of 70s and 80s Britain permeated everything. “I just remember being scared,” Lowles says. “We used to go on holiday and I tan really easily. I was frightened of coming back to school too brown.”

You can’t meet terrifying politics except with politics of your own, he realised in his teens. How to Defeat the Far Right is Lowles’s memoir-cum-manual, telling the story of how Hope Not Hate, the anti-fascist campaign group, came into existence in 2004. There is no other organisation like it, in its range of actions and independence of spirit. It does a lot of data (polling and analysis) but also a lot of community organising; it infiltrates fascist spaces, online and off, to subvert their plans, and it organises counterprotests. It is connected to institutional politics, though its influence waxes and wanes – Lowles is a good friend of Gordon Brown’s, but doesn’t feel especially heeded by the current government.

People in the Shropshire town have been left cut off and frustrated by the collapse of public transport

• UK public has paid £200bn to shareholders of key industries since privatisation – study

The city of Birmingham lies just over 40 miles north-east of Ludlow, but to the 10,000 residents of the quiet Shropshire town, it may as well be on the moon.

“You can’t get a bus to Birmingham today, it’s impossible. It is really just up the road, our big regional centre but there are no buses. How ridiculous is that?” said Philip Adams.

It was the place to be through the 1980s, a nightclub where Johnny Rotten and Kim Wilde rubbed shoulders with the Beastie Boys and, er, Mel Smith. David Koppel’s new book captures it all

Knowsley is a Labour stronghold. But judging by the polls and the people I spoke to, the messages of the right are truly cutting through

At the weekend, I took the well-worn journey from London to Knowsley in Merseyside. I’ve made this trip so many times that I can execute it with military precision, arriving just in time before the train doors close, even with a toddler in tow this time around. My uncle picked us up from the station and as we turned on to the motorway, I saw St George’s flags hanging over us from the sides of bridges. Union jacks circled the roundabout just before we turned off to go to my auntie’s house. Knowsley is Labour’s fourth-safest seat in the UK, but it felt like a newly minted Reform constituency.

It was a Friday evening, so we opened a bottle of wine and put pizzas in the oven. I was updated on various family milestones – a house sale had gone through, a baby bump was starting to show, the poor dog was on its last legs. My daughter entertained everyone with an energetic rendition of Sleeping Bunnies. Behind her, the BBC News at Six played images of migrants huddled on inflatable boats sailing across the Channel.

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Tel Aviv is known as Israel’s liberal capital; home to nearly half a million residents it’s also a holiday destination, with beaches, bars and nightclubs. But almost exactly 60km south is Gaza. Reporter Matthew Cassel speaks to Israelis in the city, to see what they think of the war, famine and genocide happening next door, and the growing international condemnation against it

Exclusive: Health secretary says Labour cannot afford to ignore far-right protests as Starmer under growing pressure

• UK politics live – latest updates

Wes Streeting has called it “laughable” that rising racism and homophobia is a sign of free speech in a strongly worded intervention suggesting Labour needed to step up its defence of minorities.

The health secretary told the LGBT foundation on Monday he wanted to address “the elephant in the room” and said he understood why some were questioning “whether this government is really on our side”.

Star of Hollywood classics including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and All the President’s Men, dies aged 89

• ‘The star who changed Hollywood’: Peter Bradshaw on Robert Redford

• Robert Redford – a life in pictures

“Tech deprives us of being inventive on our own”

The Guardian sat down with Redford in 2016 when he was promoting Disney’s remake of 1977 cult classic Pete’s Dragon, which we called: “Part ET, part Jungle Book, part Peanuts. It’s sweet and soulful and Spielberg-ish, but with a bitter streak”.

“I grew up at a time when there was no television, there was just radio. You didn’t have the aggressive technology you have today. There’s so much high tech that it deprives us of being inventive on our own. Technology deprives us of coming up with our own stories. We’re relying on stories being fed to us through technology and since I grew up at a time when that didn’t exist, you had to make up your own stories.”

Overnight advance aimed at ‘dismantling Hamas’s grip’ as Israel accused of genocide in UN human rights report

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Israel has launched its long-threatened ground offensive into the densely packed streets of Gaza City, military officials have confirmed.

One Israel Defense Forces (IDF) official said troops had begun what he called the “main phase” of the offensive, with an overnight advance from the outskirts towards the city centre.

Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey attack PM’s record over US ambassador

Vikram Dodd is the Guardian’s crime correspondent.

Police expect to arrest 50 more people following Saturday’s large far-right-led march through London, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police said this morning.

If you are Conservative right-minded, then the future is Reform. The country is going to change a lot. The same people who thought that Brexit would not happen think that Reform will not happen. They are in for a shock.