UEFA have warned that players are becoming ever more powerful as a consequence of the Bosman ruling - and played down Sepp Blatter's suggestions they are slaves to clubs.

FIFA president Sepp Blatter believes Cristiano Ronaldo should be allowed to leave Manchester United for Real Madrid if he so desires, criticising a trend towards "modern slavery" in football.

Femi Oguns' debut play, in which he also stars, is a contemporary Romeo and Juliet-type drama of young love fighting to survive in a world of corrosive enmities.

Lordly lordy lord Miss Scarlett, this musical be one biiiiiig turkey! The Gone With The Wind musical in London – a thrilling experiment in singalong slavery and whoopin' white supremacy – is closing after six weeks. I sensed something was wrong when I settled into my seat and realised I was opposite a large sign saying "Negroes For Sale", with a group of black audience members sitting uncomfortably below. We watched – open-mouthed and gaping – for three-and-a-half hours as the Confederacy tap-danced and jazz-handed its way to defeat.

Activists have outed a corporate dirty tricks operation tied to Burger King aimed at discrediting efforts to improve the often horrific conditions of migrant workers in Florida's tomato fields.

You probably had to be there to feel the full effect, but Courtney Pine's reconvening of jazz big band the Warriors for last October's Barbican Abolition concert offers plenty of incidental delights.

Devoted (if you credit the media) to booze, lechery and brawls, Britain seems to have reverted to its 18th-century manners. This outstanding history explains how the country first went "respectable". Spanning the age from the French Revolution to the arrival of Victoria, 1789 to 1837, Wilson shows how radicals and libertines looked on aghast as the evangelical middle-class hastened the spread of "cant" in a land of four-lettered freedom. It's a history of self-image as much as events: maybe Georgians were not so wild, proto-Victorians not so prim, as they thought. But even the high ideals of the prigs – such as anti-slavery – suffered from a taint of hypocrisy.

Abraham Lincoln's heartfelt letter to youngsters who asked him to free America's "little slave children" has been sold at auction for $3.4m (£1.7m).

Born in Pembroke around 1682, Bartolomew Roberts was a man of "energy, drive andability", who became the "greatest of allpirates" in every respect but one. Soon after his death, his "throat ripped out by grapeshot" during an encounter with the Royal Navy off West Africa in 1722, he was pretty much forgotten, though Long John Silver gives him a name-check in Treasure Island. Disinterred in Sanders's lively yarn, Roberts emerges as a pirate too late for the age of piracy, like the ageing gunslingers in The Wild Bunch. Ironically, the defeat of Roberts and his like "created a world safe for slavery".

Through three individuals, Walvin explores the rise and fall of the British slave trade. John Newton, who was a slave trader from 1748 to 1752, wrote "Amazing Grace" in 1772, but it was another decade before he could admit his misdeeds. Thomas Thistlewood was a slave owner responsible for terrible cruelty and depravity, though he was a "bookish man" and a dedicated gardener. The slave is Olaudah Equiano, another bookish man who was kidnapped in England and enslaved in Montserrat. In this disturbing but gripping book, Walvin explains the British volte-face on slavery.

Another day on red clay, another figure in the black for Rafael Nadal. The statistics will show that Lleyton Hewitt yesterday became the Spaniard's 57th successive victim on terre battue, but any impression that the French Open's defending champion is having an easy ride here would be thoroughly misleading.