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[H3] Labour leadershipWes Streeting confirms he will stand if Labour leadership race is triggered
Ex-health secretary sets out fledgling policy platform – including call for new special relationship with EU
[H3] ‘We need a different path’Andy Burnham says Labour must put energy and water under public control
[H3] Keir Starmer‘Why are we even doing this?’ Week of leadership manoeuvres leaves Starmer looking like interim leader
[H3] ‘An hour of abuse'Jeremy Corbyn on Labour coups, and whether he feels sorry for Starmer
[H3] ‘We need a different path’Andy Burnham says Labour must put energy and water under public control
[H3] Keir Starmer‘Why are we even doing this?’ Week of leadership manoeuvres leaves Starmer looking like interim leader
[H3] ‘An hour of abuse'Jeremy Corbyn on Labour coups, and whether he feels sorry for Starmer
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[H3] ProtestsTommy Robinson tells tens of thousands at London rally to prepare for ‘battle of Britain’
Turnout down at second Unite the Kingdom march featuring Islamophobic and ethnonationalist hate speech and flyers
[H3] UKBritish Palestinians feel ‘gaslit’ and unable to speak out, says leading activist
[H3] UK newsMan arrested in London after 30-year-old run over by van near flag protest in Birmingham
[IMG: Manchester City players and staff celebrate with the FA Cup trophy after beating Chelsea.]
[H3] FootballManchester City win FA Cup final as Semenyo’s moment of magic floors Chelsea
[H3] ChelseaXabi Alonso agrees deal in principle to become Chelsea head coach
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[H3] ItalySeven people injured after man drives car into pedestrians in northern Italy
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[H3] LiveEurovision song contest 2026
It’s time for the 70th annual musica extravaganza – this time from Vienna (and minus a few of the usual faces). Join us for every wild moment
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[H3] FootballHearts condemn ‘shameful’ abuse of players and staff after Celtic defeat
[H3] Scottish PremiershipCeltic stun Hearts at the last in dramatic final-day shootout to retain Scottish title
[IMG: A man in a green T shirt stands amid rubble of a destroyed house by a yellow JCB digger.]
[H3] JerusalemPalestinians forced to demolish own homes to make way for Israeli theme park
[H3] IsraelIsraeli strikes kill six in southern Lebanon hours after extension of ceasefire
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[H3] EnvironmentTimmy the whale confirmed dead by Danish authorities
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[H3] LondonMick Jagger and Eric Clapton win battle to stop 29-storey block being built by Thames
[H2] The Saturday read
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[H3] The Saturday readDown and then out in Paris and London? Why Starmer isn’t the only one with a popularity problem
As continent faces tough headwinds, leaders are bearing brunt of delivering bad news to frustrated electorates
[H2] In focus
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[H3] River Thames‘You feel you’ve conquered the world’: a Thames swimmer on the river’s first bathing site in London
While there are still days the Thames is so dirty even dogs avoid it, steps are being taken to restore public waterways
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[H3] ItalyPeacock ‘invasion’ of Italian seaside town ruffles feathers
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[H3] Donald TrumpPomp, pageantry but precious little to show for Trump’s Beijing excursion
[H2] Features
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[H3] The 100 best novels of all time
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[H3] ChinaFake lawyers, scientists, chefs and punters: meet the ‘white monkeys’ paid to make Chinese businesses look global
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[H3] 100 best novelsWho’s in, who’s out, and how many have you read? The story behind our 100 best novels list
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[H3] ReviewJohn Lennon: The Last Interview – Soderbergh imagines there’s no people with bland AI clipshow
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[H3] Blind dateBlind date: ‘Distance shouldn’t stand in the way of love … I did have to catch the last train home though’
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[H3] ReviewThe Beloved: Javier Bardem turns in a career-scariest performance
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[H3] Press freedomOne thing Guardian staff have done to defend press freedom … and one thing you can do
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[H3] The Filter‘Don’t be fooled by fancy packaging’: the best (and worst) supermarket shortbread, tasted and rated
[H2] Weekend
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[H3] Six great readsA man’s search for his daughter’s killer, the secrets to spotting a liar – and what is hot divorcee energy?
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[H3] Going out, staying inFrom Normal to Ania Magliano: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead
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[H3] Your Guardian sport weekendUS PGA golf, a Six Nations decider and Premier League drama – follow with us
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[H3] The week in reviewsRivals to The Christophers: the week in rave reviews
[H2] Sport
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[H3] FootballAlonso agrees deal in principle to become Chelsea head coach
Chelsea are on the verge of appointing Xabi Alonso after reaching an agreement in principle with the Spaniard to become their new head coach
[H3] ReactionGuardiola says ‘no time’ to celebrate FA Cup win with league title still to play for
[H3] Chelsea 0-1 Man CitySemenyo's audacious flick sees off Chelsea at Wembley
[H3] Jacob SteinbergCity’s Cup glory: where final against Chelsea was won and lost
[H3] Player ratingsSemenyo stars for City, but Caicedo and James struggle
[IMG: Cammy Devlin shows his despair after Celtic score their third goal.]
[H3] Hearts were broken again, but a season of such magnitude should be relished
Jonathan WilsonFailure to wrench the title from the Glasgow giants is no cause for remorse given that Celtic and Rangers have been shaken from their lethargy
[H3] Celtic 3-1 HeartsBhoys break Hearts at the last in dramatic final-day shootout
[H3] As it happenedLook back at our how all the final-day drama unfolded
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[H3] Golf liveUS PGA Championship 2026 – McIlroy surges in third round
[H3] US PGAScheffler remains in hunt at halfway despite ‘absurd’ pins
[H3] The RecapSign up for our weekly newsletter of editors' picks
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[H3] Cricket liveNew Zealand beat England in rain-hit third women's ODI as series is drawn 1-1
[H3] Cricket liveYorkshire v Surrey, Somerset v Sussex, and more – County Championship
[H3] Ali MartinEngland head to training camp with post-Ashes identity still a mystery
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[H3] FootballSalah criticises ‘crumbling’ Liverpool and demands return to ‘heavy metal’ football
Salah posted on social media after 4-2 loss at Aston Villa and the Egyptian forward’s comments appear aimed at Arne Slot
[H3] Man UtdUnited close to confirming Carrick as permanent head coach
[H3] Real MadridThirteen years on: search for a saviour set to end in Mourinho return
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[H3] Prem RugbyFree-flowing Harlequins dent Exeter playoff hopes with Twickenham comeback
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[H3] Giro d'ItaliaNarváez breaks free to win his second stage of 2026 race
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[H3] Women's Super LeagueManchester City mark WSL title by thrashing West Ham as Shaw doubles up
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[H3] European footballKane uncorks title party with hat-trick; Lewandowski to leave Barça
[H2] Opinion
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[H3] I’m a Eurovision superfan, but this year’s contest brings only sadness. I won’t be tuning in
Dave KeatingMismanagement and political campaigning have sucked the joy out of an event meant to bring people together
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[H3] It wasn’t exactly The Devil Wears Prada, but my time working at Vogue in the 90s was preposterous fun
Charlotte HigginsThe decline of the glossy magazine industry as depicted in the sequel made me cry – but I shed no tears for how it was back then, says Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian’s chief culture writer
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[H3] I ran aid programmes for 25 years – getting my car fixed at an Islamabad market taught me why they don’t work
Mohammad Altaf Afridi
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[H3] Pity the poor AI datacenters facing ‘discrimination’
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[H2] More opinion
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[H3] The hantavirus debacle raises a key question: why would anyone go on a cruise?
Dave Schilling
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[H3] The release of the UFO files won’t satisfy conspiracy theorists – but it certainly serves Trump’s agenda
Daniel Lavelle
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[H3] Starmer, Burnham, Farage, Polanski: they make a week in politics feel like an eternity in Hades
Marina Hyde
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[H3] No more chancers or failures – the coming contest must produce a British PM worthy of the name
Jonathan Freedland
[H2] Editorials
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[H3] The Guardian view Middlemarch: the greatest novel in the English language
[H3] The Guardian viewTrump in Beijing: the US and China are playing the waiting game
[H2] Letters
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[H3] MediaHow to reach the lost in an age of disinformation
[H3] Artificial intelligenceRichard Dawkins and the question of AI consciousness
[H3] Panini stickersPanini sticker album feature stirred childhood memories
[H3] DeathSchemes and strategies for scattering ashes
[H2] Cartoon
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[H3] The Saturday cartoonJeremy Nguyen on the must-have fashion accessory for kids
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[H3] MaldivesMaldives diver dies in operation to recover bodies of Italians from cave
Mohamed Mahudhee suffered decompression sickness after searching for scuba divers in Vaavu Atoll and died in hospital
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1:05
[H3] ThailandAt least eight people killed in Bangkok rail crossing collision
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[H3] Reed Jobs‘Research here is world class’: son of Steve Jobs looks to invest in UK cancer care
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[H3] UK newsSoldier dies after falling from horse at Royal Windsor Horse Show
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[H3] Donald TrumpAt least five people pardoned by Trump for Capitol attack accused of new crimes
[H2] Climate crisis & environment
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[H3] ExclusiveDeclare climate crisis a global public health emergency, experts tell WHO
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[H3] Climate crisisBan private jets and cut speed limits to avert UK fuel crisis, say campaigners
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[H3] FloridaFlorida tightens rules on capturing giant manta rays but stops short of full ban
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[H3] Architecture‘Floats above the landscape’: the architect whose designs touch the earth lightly
[H2] UK news
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[H3] MuttiPlum position: how Mutti turned tinned tomatoes into a status symbol
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[H3] Social classA third of Britons believe they have changed social class, survey finds
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[H3] JudaismGiant green pickle tells us UK’s Jewish culture month has begun
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[H3] BristolNeo-Nazi obsessed teen jailed for trying to kill Kurdish man in Bristol with axe
[H2] World news
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[H3] AnalysisArrest of Iraqi terror suspect with alleged links to Iran’s Quds Force is astonishing but not surprising
[H3] Western AustraliaShark attack leaves man in critical condition
[H3] Donald TrumpTrump may settle his lawsuit against IRS for $1.7bn fund to compensate allies
[H3] US newsWhat we learned from the cringey courtroom drama between Elon Musk and Sam Altman
[H2] Business & technology
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[H3] TechnologyCanvas hack: is it ever a good idea to pay a ransom, and what happens to the data?
[H3] US mediaCBS News insiders fear Bari Weiss will soon enact ‘massive changes’ to 60 Minutes
[H3] Jobs‘It makes me feel quite dehumanised’: young at London career fair lay bare barriers to jobs
[H3] Insurance industryFTSE 100-listed insurer Hiscox’s shares leap amid report of takeover bid
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[H3] Eurovision 2026How did Eurovision go from sequins and flares to geopolitical slugfest?
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[IMG: Novels shooting out of a gold canon]
Illustration: Lisa Sheehan/The GuardianView image in fullscreen Illustration: Lisa Sheehan/The Guardian
[H1] Who’s in, who’s out, and how many have you read? The story behind our 100 best novels list
Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights; Ulysses or Catch-22 … Find out which title came top, as chosen by authors, critics and academics worldwide
See the full list here
As Stephen King points out, compiling a list of the greatest novels of all time is an impossible task. King is one of more than 170 novelists, critics and academics the Guardian polled for their top 10, ranked in order, which we tallied to compile an overall 100. But, as he argued, 10 books is “not enough!” On King’s list there is, he’s sorry to say, “not a single Dickens”; he wishes he’d found space for David Copperfield or Oliver Twist.One Day author David Nicholls’s choices are “definitely skewed towards novels I read at an impressionable age”, he says. Bernardine Evaristo listed “some of my all‑time favourites, including several classics of the past 100 years”. Salman Rushdie, Anne Enright, Yiyun Li, Elif Shafak, Ian McEwan, Maggie O’Farrell, Colm Tóibín, Lorrie Moore, Katherine Rundell and many more have all cast their votes.
[IMG: Salman Rushdie]
View image in fullscreenSalman Rushdie is the highest-ranking living author in the list, at No 23 with Midnight’s Children. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty ImagesNever has such a list been more needed. Dwindling attention spans, screens, Netflix; whatever we blame, reading for pleasure is a dying pursuit. Half of adults in the UK say they never read, and levels among children and young people are at their lowest in 20 years. This year has been declared the National Year of Reading to address this crisis. “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all,” Henry David Thoreau advised. We are here to help.“Lists procreate; they give rise to other lists,” Margaret Atwood observed. In 2003, the Observer’s then literary editor Robert McCrum compiled a list of the 100 greatest novels of all time, itself inspired by the BBC’s Big Read earlier that year, which asked the nation to choose its favourite novels. McCrum’s more informal polling – “roaming the office for a week and buttonholing colleagues about their favourite fiction” – resulted in a list that was, as he admitted, “partial and highly personal”. But it got people talking about books. So he repeated the exercise again in 2015, this time limiting his choice to novels written in English, by which time social media had arrived to amplify the debate.Our list includes any book published in English, but originally written in any language. It is still partial – all lists are. Neither can we make a claim to being definitive – this is literature, not science. Is the best novel one that changes the genre, society or the individual? One that captures the zeitgeist, or has an afterlife far beyond its pages. Or a novel that scorches itself so deeply into your soul you can remember exactly when and where you were when you first read it? None of these criteria on their own is enough. My Proustian madeleine will be your raw potato. My Mrs Dalloway your Mrs Bridge. But we hope that in asking those who devote their days to the craft and understanding of fiction from around the globe, the result is as authoritative, ambitious and far-reaching as possible.
[IMG: Illustration of books falling from above]
View image in fullscreen Illustration: Lisa Sheehan/The GuardianThe most striking difference between this list and its predecessors is an increase in female writers: 36 out of 100 compared with 21 in 2015 and a paltry 16 in 2003, with only Jane Austen’s Emma and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the top 10 of both previous lists. The number of women rises as the decades go by; half of the contemporary writers are female. This might not announce the decline of the great white male, but it does signal a much-needed reset.Spoiler alert: top spot goes to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a vast cathedral of a novel taking in love, faith, friendship, betrayal, science, politics, morality and power, but never losing sight of its provincial inhabitants. As one of our panellists wrote, “anyone who reads this novel cannot come out of it unchanged”. Virginia Woolf famously declared it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. OK, it is not as obviously passionate as Wuthering Heights (it is never going to have a soundtrack by Charli xcx), at No 20 on our list, or as fun as Pride and Prejudice (at nine). But all human life is here.Another undisputed masterpiece is Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved at No 2. Just as Eliot wanted to make the lives of ordinary people real, so Morrison set out to make personal the experience of enslaved people. Beloved confirmed her as the great American novelist of her time. This devastating novel will haunt you for life.
[IMG: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie]
View image in fullscreenChimamanda Ngozi Adichie makes the cut with Half of a Yellow Sun. Photograph: Marcus Ingram/Getty ImagesWoolf is the surprise winner of our list, coming in at No 4 with To the Lighthouse, just after her arch‑rival James Joyce and his modernist epic Ulysses. With five novels on the list, she is the most voted for writer – beating even Austen and Dickens, with four each. Everyone loves Aunt Jane, but snobby Virginia was always a harder sell. Who could resist Mrs Dalloway’s Clarissa stepping out to buy flowers, though: “What a lark! What a plunge!” Great to see the mercurial Orlando and The Waves in there, too. Bluestockings, rejoice!In Search of Lost Time at No 5 (a whopping seven volumes and 4,000 pages), War and Peace, Bleak House, Moby-Dick, Tristram Shandy; many of the leviathans are here – and that’s just the top 20. This is not a list for the literary faint-hearted. The top end is indisputably canon‑heavy (but the 2015 list had that famous page‑turner The Pilgrim’s Progress in first place). Thank goodness for F Scott Fitzgerald’s slender American masterpiece The Great Gatsby – a shot of perfection at No 11.Salman Rushdie is the highest-ranking living author with Midnight’s Children, his 1981 magical realist tour de force opening on the eve of Indian independence (it was awarded the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and recognised again in a public vote in 2008). Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro follows with the much more restrained but immaculately executed The Remains of the Day. Han Kang, the first Korean writer to be awarded the Nobel, is in for her disquieting cult novel The Vegetarian.
[IMG: Muriel Spark]
View image in fullscreenMuriel Spark is at No 31 with her 1961 masterpiece The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty ImagesHilary Mantel’s monumental fictional reimagining of Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall had to be there. As did Atwood’s horribly prescient The Handmaid’s Tale, climbing up the list, no doubt helped by the hit TV series and world events; so did the numinous Marilynne Robinson, whose fans include Barack Obama, with Housekeeping. And what joy to see Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first in her Neapolitan quartet about two girls, which transports the reader so powerfully into its world you can almost smell the streets of Naples. It wasn’t No 1 in the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the 21st century for nothing.Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, a love story set against the Biafran war, was voted the Women’s prize “winner of winners” in 2020, and affirmed the arrival of one of the most talented writers today. And while Zadie Smith may be dismissive of her precocious debut White Teeth (she called it “the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old”), critical opinion disagrees. Published in the earliest days of the new millennium, it heralded a fresh new era for British fiction.Along with Morrison’s novels, other cornerstones of Black American literature including Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God are joined by lesser-known works such as Edward P Jones’s Pulitzer prize-winning The Known World, set 20 years before the start of the civil war.
[IMG: Patricia Highsmith]
View image in fullscreenPatricia Highsmith got the thumbs-up with film-maker’s favourite The Talented Mr Ripley. Photograph: Liselotte Erben/Sygma/Getty ImagesVS Naipaul’s 1961 A House for Mr Biswas is there, but so, too, is 1988’s Nervous Conditions, the first in a trilogy by Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga. The presence of Arundhati Roy’s debut, The God of Small Things, shows the impact it made on readers when it surprised everyone by beating established names to win the Booker in 1997.As with all prize lists, the real fun is spotting who is out. Noticeably absent are the big beasts who stalked the late-20th century literary landscape in the US – Mailer, Updike, Roth – and their British descendants. Perhaps this reflects a post-#MeToo discomfort at so much female objectification, no matter how dazzling the prose. However, the morally contentious Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, long hailed the supreme stylist of English prose, survives even the toxic endorsement of Jeffrey Epstein, who, we can safely assume, missed its dark ironies.Updike, who succeeded in “giving the mundane its beautiful due”, will be missed by many. And as one born under the mark of Martin Amis, I can’t help but think there should be a place for an era-defining novel like Money. There’s a pang, too, for McEwan’s Atonement, which held me in its spell as fervently as LP Hartley’s 1953 The Go-Between (to which it owes a debt), which scrapes in at 99. Maybe these writers are just too recent: Amis only died in 2023, after all.
[IMG: Graham Greene]
View image in fullscreenGraham Greene’s devastating 1951 novel The End of the Affair makes it in. Photograph: Harold Chapman/TopFotoThe same might be true of the now unfashionable postwar writers: there’s no CS Lewis, William Golding or Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings was the nation’s favourite in the BBC’s Big Read). No Angela Carter, Penelope Fitzgerald or Iris Murdoch. But this is bearable because Muriel Spark’s peerless The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair – two sticks of dynamite – both make the grade. As does Australian Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, which took her 27 drafts, apparently, and may take as many readings to fully understand.But where is Nancy Mitford’s glittering 1945 The Pursuit of Love, which deserves a place for its last two lines alone? The comic novel, like science fiction and crime, rarely fares well in bookish horse races. Patricia Highsmith makes the cut, but not John le Carré – or Stephen King, for that matter. Happily, for her devoted fans, Ursula K Le Guin is recognised for The Left Hand of Darkness, with which, according to the critic Harold Bloom, “Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time”. There are no children’s novels, either – no Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web or Harry Potter. It is a very grown-up list.“Best” demands not just excellence but supremacy, “surpassing all others” (OED). Is The Handmaid’s Tale better than Little Women (not in), both seminal feminist texts? Is The Color Purple better than To Kill a Mockingbird (another surprise omission)? Is David Copperfield better than The Catcher in the Rye (ditto)? Clearly there is no right answer.Who might be on a list in 2036? A writer from the past who deserves more recognition – Nella Larsen, perhaps; someone who is rejuvenating the form for a modern readership – Sally Rooney, say; or those rewriting history from a different perspective, such as Colson Whitehead and Percival Everett. And perhaps an as yet unknown Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot’s real name), toiling over a Middlemarch for our century.Until then, this is a list of the best novels of all time, chosen by many of the best writers of our time. I hope your favourites are here. Lists are designed to inspire and enrage. And if you hate them all, don’t blame me, blame David Nicholls or Stephen King.Explore more on these topicsBooks100 best novelsFictionFiction in translationShare
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[IMG: man in navy uniform poses with thumb up, an american flag behind him]
‘They do what they like to do: they took him up, they shook him around, he barfed on himself, and he came out and said, “I love this.”’ Photograph: Allstar/ParamountView image in fullscreen‘They do what they like to do: they took him up, they shook him around, he barfed on himself, and he came out and said, “I love this.”’ Photograph: Allstar/Paramount
[H1] ‘It looked like Star Wars on Earth’: the making of Top Gun at 40
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and co-writer Jack Epps discuss how the smash hit action drama came to be, from Tom Cruise vomiting on himself to ruling the box officeIt would be one of the most important flights in film history. When a young 5ft 7in actor with long hair and ponytail rocked up on a motorcycle, a group of US navy pilots were all too happy to test his need for speed.“They look at him and they don’t know who Tom Cruise is,” recalls screenwriter Jack Epps Jr. “They do what they like to do: they took him up, they shook him around, he barfed on himself, and he came out and said, ‘I love this.’ From that moment, he was on.”Cruise’s experience that day with the Blue Angels, the US navy’s premier flight demo squadron, would inspire him to become a licensed pilot. He would also accept the role of Maverick in Top Gun, a movie about cold war flying aces that redefined the modern blockbuster. Co-written by Epps and Jim Cash, directed by Tony Scott and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, it turns 40 on Saturday.Top Gun review – now impossible to view Tom Cruise’s testosterone-swamped film without affection Read moreTop Gun charts reckless navy pilot Maverick’s rivalry with Iceman (Val Kilmer), romance with instructor Charlie (Kelly McGillis) and guilt over the death of co-pilot Goose (Anthony Edwards) in a training accident. He is sent on a dangerous rescue mission, saves Iceman and gains redemption, with Iceman telling him: “You can be my wingman anytime.”The high-testosterone slice of Ronald Reagan-era Americana – with a homoerotic game of beach volleyball thrown in – made 23-year-old Cruise a star and drove a spike in military enlistment; the navy even set up recruitment tables in cinemas. It eventually spawned a hit sequel in 2022, with a third instalment now on the way.It all began in 1983 when Bruckheimer was flicking through the May issue of California magazine. “Top Guns” read a headline, with a big photo from inside the cockpit of an F-14 fighter jet. The article began: “At Mach 2 and 40,000 feet over California, it’s always high noon.”Speaking from Los Angeles, Bruckheimer, 82, recalls: “I saw the magazine article and it looked like Star Wars on Earth and I threw it to my partner, Don Simpson, and then he called in one of our executives and said, ‘Let’s get the rights to this,’ and that’s how it started.”The pair pitched the idea to producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, then head of production at Paramount, and he was impressed. When Katzenberg floated five or six ideas to screenwriters Cash and Epps over breakfast one day, Top Gun was among them. Epps, who had a private pilot’s licence, seized on it.The 76-year-old, based in Santa Monica, recalls: “I said, ‘Wow, this will be great, I get to fly in the jet plane!’ We didn’t have a movie made yet. Even if it didn’t get made I’d get a jet ride out of it, so that’s a pretty special thing. My partner didn’t like to fly so I had to talk him into it but that was no problem.“We met with the producer Simpson. Bruckheimer and I said my concern is if we’re gonna do this project, we have to go up in real planes. We can’t have some special effects of planes; it has to be the real things.”This requirement was central to the pitch made to the Pentagon to secure military cooperation. “I pitched the idea of how we see these young American heroes and they said, ‘Sounds interesting and we’ll let you use our equipment. You know, you’ll have to fly in a navy jet?’ I said, ‘Oh, no, really?! How fast can I get down there?’”Epps was dispatched to the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar to immerse himself in the cloistered, elite subculture of naval aviators. He interviewed 30 pilots but the true revelation came when he was strapped into the back of a jet at full throttle.“I had to go through training, which gave me a lot of ideas,” he says. “Before I could go up, I had know how to eject and go through what is called the helo dunker, where they put you under water and you have to go out in a very systematic manner. All these crazy things were great because it gave me a full feeling for it.“We got up in the air and they said to me, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this but we’re gonna do it anyway,’ so they did a lot of close passes. We pulled six G’s and I learned that, when you’re pulling G’s, although you do have a special uniform that compresses your legs, you’ve got to grunt to keep the blood up in your brain.”
[IMG: Pretty woman and and handsome man standing outside with arms around each other]
View image in fullscreenKelly McGillis and Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Photograph: Paramount/Sportsphoto/AllstarEpps continues: “It was phenomenal and the speed was amazing. I had never felt that in my life. The skill of these guys to be able to pull that hard-G turn, come up over the top, cross each other, barrel roll again, come back and go back in high-speed passes was fabulous.“When I got down, I called my partner and said, ‘Jim, this is not what we thought this was. These guys are athletes, they’re strong, this is about speed we’ve never seen before in our life.’ We both were athletes – Jim played football in high school, I played ice hockey up until my 30s – and so we took an athlete’s view of this. These guys were very special and athletes like to compete with each other.”But as Epps watched F-14s taking off and landing, he realised there was still a plot-sized hole at the centre of the project. Drama demands friction but the pilots at Miramar were entirely unified. “I’m looking at these guys and they’re all getting along because they’re all about teamwork and I’m going, ‘What am I going to write about? What is the story here? What’s the conflict?’“I’m racking my head and I go, ‘Oh, what if one guy doesn’t get along? What if one guy is out to be the star? It’s about him and now you’ve got this bump in this situation.’ That’s the beginning of the character Maverick where we said, ‘OK, here’s where the conflict comes from internally. Somebody wants to be the best here at top gun school.’”The emotional anchor of the film – the shocking mid-point death of Maverick’s radar intercept officer Goose – was a narrative risk directly inspired by the profound grief that Epps had witnessed among the real-life pilots.“We went out and we had a coffee together and I was sitting around with about six, seven guys and they started talking about the friends that they had lost in Vietnam. This was 15 years later and I could see they were still deeply mourning the loss of their colleagues and the fellow pilots and I was very taken by the sincere emotions they had.‘It’s a distraction-free zone’: Gen Z on why they love going to the moviesRead more“I had a thought to myself as a writer: if I could get the audience to feel what they feel, the sense of loss, I will have achieved something. That’s when I got the idea to lose Goose in the middle because it would bring the audience in, they’d feel a sense of loss, like what it means to lose a pilot, lose a friend, and so we went with that and it’s quite a moment.”With the script taking shape, the vital question of casting loomed large. The role of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell required an actor of singular charisma and swagger. For Epps, there was only one choice. “I was a Tom Cruise fan at that time – still am – so we wrote this with Tom Cruise in mind as Maverick. I loved his movies: he’s such an energetic actor, he connects with the audience.“We were finishing up the script and I turned it over to Jerry Bruckheimer at the gates of Bel Air on a Saturday night. I said, ‘Jerry, think Tom Cruise when you read this.’ He read it and so did Don and they both said, ‘Yeah, love the script. Tom Cruise: great idea.’”Bruckheimer echoes this sentiment, confirming that Cruise was their immediate target. However, securing the young star – who had grown his hair long for Ridley Scott’s fantastical film Legend – was not a straightforward task.Bruckheimer recounts: “We couldn’t quite get him to commit so I arranged for him to fly with the Blue Angels in El Centro, California. He had long hair and a ponytail and they saw this guy walk up and they said, ‘We’ll get this hippy a real ride.’ They sure did and he got out of the plane, walked to a phone booth, because there were no cell phones then, called me up, said, ‘I’m in.’”Pete Pettigrew, a former top gun instructor, served as a crucial technical adviser. Once production commenced under the visionary eye of Scott, the film had to balance its spectacular aesthetic ambitions with its emotional core. Bruckheimer admits that the process of editing Top Gun was a delicate negotiation between visual grandeur and narrative substance.
[IMG: A man in black patched jacket and sunglasses.]
View image in fullscreenTom Cruise in Top Gun. Photograph: Paramount/Allstar“We watched it in various stages. We watched some early cuts, which were more style over substance, and that’s where Tony comes from. He’s an amazing artist and commercial director and he’s a brilliant visualist and he over-indexed in that area, and then we sat with him, the editor, and went through every scene together and brought it back to the movie that’s out there.”After an initial reluctance, the US military had seen the potential of Top Gun to burnish its image and encourage young people to sign up. But this cooperation has fuelled a persistent critique from the left over the ensuing decades: that Top Gun is an overly jingoistic, pro-war recruitment tool wrapped in a pop soundtrack.Epps rejects this reading, preferring to view the film through the deeply personal lens of the service members he interviewed. “These are great American heroes and they put their lives on the line every day for America. They love the country and they’re there to protect us so it’s a little silly to not honour our veterans and our people in the military who basically protect us.“These are heroes. You’re always going to hear somebody say that but in no way was it suggesting that they’re creating wars. They’re basically there to protect. They are the tip of the spear and out there every day putting their lives on the line for us.”Despite the confidence of the film-makers, the road to release was fraught with unknowns. An early test screening in Houston, immediately after the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, left the production team anxious. Bruckheimer admits: “There was no laughter, there was nothing. It was just dead and we thought for sure it was a disaster. Then when the numbers came back it scored high and we were shocked.”Epps recalls the first time he saw the film at a private screening. “It was sensational. What was so great about Tony Scott’s directing is he understood this sense of speed, the sense of the G-forces, and he was able to shoot it, edit it. That made the audience feel like they were flying in a jet. Tom’s performance was great and the music was fantastic.”Although the critic Pauline Kael branded it a “shiny homoerotic commercial”, Top Gun earned $357m worldwide to become the No 1 film of 1986 while its accompanying album was the bestselling soundtrack. The song Take My Breath Away by Berlin went on to win the Oscar for best original song.As Bruckheimer continues to work on the highly anticipated third film, he points to a singular reason why Top Gun continues to endure. “Tom Cruise,” the producer states emphatically. “He’s the hardest-working actor in Hollywood and has amazing instincts. He is somebody that just won’t let anything go by unless it’s worked out. He wants to make movies for an audience and that’s what he does.”Explore more on these topicsTop GunTom CruiseTony ScottTop Gun: MaverickAction and adventure filmsDrama filmsfeaturesShareReuse this content
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[H3] ‘A watchdog without resources is not a watchdog’: Labor accused of letting key accountability body languish
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[H3] POV: you’re Jim Chalmers using social media to sell the most ambitious budget of your life
[IMG: Australian Opposition leader Angus Taylor]
[H3] Angus Taylor says migrants are a ‘net drain’ on Australia. The numbers say the opposite is true
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[H2] Europe
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[IMG: A smashed-up car on a street]
[H3] Seven people injured after man drives car into pedestrians in northern Italy
Man in 30s arrested over incident in Modena that left two seriously hurt
[IMG: Humpback whale swims into barge while two men swims next to it]
[H3] Timmy the whale confirmed dead by Danish authorities
[IMG: A courtroom sketch shows Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi seated before a judge]
[H3] Arrest of Iraqi terror suspect with alleged links to Iran’s Quds Force is astonishing but not surprising
[IMG: Residents take photos of a peacock in Punta Marina.]
[H3] Peacock ‘invasion’ of Italian seaside town ruffles feathers
[IMG: Monica Montefalcone]
[H3] Maldives diver dies in operation to recover bodies of Italians from cave
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[H2] Middle East
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[IMG: A crowd in an open area of Gaza City hold portraits of Izz al-Din al-Haddad and convey a body wrapped in Hamas colours]
[H3] Israeli strikes kill six in southern Lebanon hours after extension of ceasefire
Three paramedics at health centre among dead, while Israel also says it killed Hamas military chief in Gaza
[IMG: An Israeli military vehicle drives on a dirt road alongside a tall border wall through hilly terrain]
[H3] Shaky truce between Israel and Lebanon extended for 45 days, US says
[IMG: A close up of a bearded man, the film director Asghar Farhadi.]
[H3] ‘Extremely cruel and tragic’: Iranian director Asghar Farhadi speaks out against state violence and the war
[IMG: Vessels in the strait of Hormuz near Musandam, Oman, with mountains visible behind]
[H3] Oman caught between US and Iran after Tehran’s claims of joint strait of Hormuz plan
[IMG: Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline]
[H3] UAE to complete second oil pipeline bypassing strait of Hormuz by 2027
All Middle East and north Africa stories
[H2] South and Central Asia
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[IMG: Gautam Adani in a dark suit and burgundy tie gestures while speaking at a podium]
[H3] US reportedly dropped fraud charges against Indian billionaire after he hired Trump’s lawyer
Gautam Adani, richest man in Asia, was accused of conspiring to pay $250m in bribes to Indian government officials
[IMG: Roger Stone in a dark suit and striped tie looks over his shoulder against a blue backdrop.]
[H3] Trump ally Roger Stone condemned for providing lobbying services to Myanmar’s military junta
[IMG: Armed security forces in fatigues guard a hospital in Kolkata]
[H3] Tensions high in West Bengal after BJP aide shot dead and hundreds arrested
[IMG: Mamata Banerjee speaking into a microphone during a press conference]
[H3] ‘Defeated by conspiracy’: West Bengal chief minister refuses to resign after election loss
[IMG: Narendra Modi, India]
[H3] Narendra Modi’s BJP wins election in West Bengal for the first time
All South and Central Asia stories
[H2] UK
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[IMG: Police and crowd marshals form a line in front of protesters holding union jack and Saint George]
[H3] Tommy Robinson tells tens of thousands at London rally to prepare for ‘battle of Britain’
Turnout down at second Unite the Kingdom march featuring Islamophobic and ethnonationalist hate speech and flyers
[IMG: Supporters of British far-right activist Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, take part in a march organised by Unite The Kingdom, in central London]
[H3] Tens of thousands march through London for far-right and pro-Palestine protests – as it happened
[IMG: Three police officers in hi-vis vests stand in a line facing a crowd with flags]
[H3] Man arrested in London after 30-year-old run over by van near flag protest in Birmingham
[IMG: Streeting in a dark suit walks through a modern interior surrounded by media and cameras]
[H3] Wes Streeting confirms he will stand if Labour leadership race is triggered
[IMG: King]
[H3] Soldier dies after falling from horse at Royal Windsor Horse Show
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[H2] US
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[IMG: Kash Patel in a suit]
[H3] Kash Patel faces scrutiny over snorkeling outing at USS Arizona memorial in Hawaii
FBI director reportedly took a snorkel excursion at site containing remains of more than 1,000 navy sailors and marines
[IMG: Long Island Rail Road workers walk the picket line outside Penn Station in Manhattan, New York, on 16 May 2026.]
[H3] North America’s largest commuter rail system shuts down as workers strike
[IMG: Lauren Boebert at the US Capitol on 13 May 2026.]
[H3] Lauren Boebert suggests Trump withheld funds to Colorado over prosecution of election denier
[IMG: A group of African American men and women, some sitting and some standing, at a gathering, with some appearing to talk while others listen.]
[H3] Harlem Renaissance documentary finally gets global premiere 50 years after cameras rolled
[IMG: a man behind a desk]
[H3] Republican Louisiana senator in tough primary after Trump backs opponent
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[H2] Most viewed
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