From Russia to South Africa, India to the US, the coming year’s contests could embolden dictators or revitalise democracies

Who says democracy is dying? A record-breaking 40-plus countries , representing more than 40% of the world’s population and an outsized chunk of global GDP, are due to hold national elections in 2024. The outcomes, taken separately and together, will help determine who controls and directs the 21st-century world.

Casting lots in this multinational, multiparty democratic Super Bowl are some of the most powerful and wealthiest states (the US, India, the UK), some of the weakest (South Sudan), the most despotic (Russia, Iran) and the most stressed (Taiwan, Ukraine). Some elections will be open, free and fair, many less so. Some will not be free at all.

As the Oscar-winning actor returns to his filthy desk as Jackson Lamb in the Apple TV+ espionage thriller, we look at the man behind many masks

There are bad bosses, and then there’s Jackson Lamb: rumpled, smelly, discouraging and mildly corrupt. Yet for fans of Slow Horses , the returning Apple TV+ series based on the espionage fiction of Mick Herron , this is a character that reliably emits a magnetic, congealed gleam. Like a day-old doner kebab.

Lamb, rendered in grimy perfection for the small screen by Gary Oldman, is the underachieving spymaster who has been mysteriously placed in charge of a sidelined team of defunct spooks.

As the old man on Led Zeppelin’s fourth album artwork is identified, we take a look at albums that are as famous for the faces on their sleeves as their music

When I was young, I was entranced by the mysterious figures who appeared on the sleeves of vinyl albums. Where did Roxy Music find its inexhaustible supply of glamorous women? Who was the weather-beaten fisher on the front of the Cure’s Standing on a Beach and how did he know the Cure ? Like many children, I assumed that the nine celebrities on the sleeve of Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and Wings – including Michael Parkinson, comedian Kenny Lynch and Liberal MP Clement Freud – represented the actual line-up of Wings, which would have made for a challenging studio environment.

In the Google era, one can answer these questions in seconds. Roxy Music knew a lot of models, and Bryan Ferry dated half of them. The fisher (retired) was called John Button. (“The man featured on the album cover was not a member of the Cure,” Wikipedia helpfully notes.) Parkinson did not play with Wings. Some mysteries, however, have proved harder to solve.

Toad knows just the place!

He’s been poisoned and jailed... but not silenced. Now Navalny poses the greatest threat to the president’s 21-year rule

Alexei Navalny was in defiant mood last Tuesday, as he waited for his inevitable sentence. He made a heart gesture for his wife, Yulia, who was sitting at the back of Moscow’s city courtroom. Navalny smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t be sad! Everything is going to be all right,” he yelled at her. She waved back. Meanwhile, a state prosecutor droned on.

Last week’s sham trial was the latest episode in an epic stand-off between two men for a nation’s future. One is the man in the dock, Russia’s foremost opposition leader, and now a global figure, likened by some to Nelson Mandela. The other is the country’s president of two decades, a former KGB colonel who appears determined to stay in power and to smash a popular revolt against him.