Highlights
Art
The National Gallery’s wrong-headed Gauguin warning label
Great art should be able to exist without modern moral judgment
‘Reasoned debate feels like a fucked idea’: Isabel Nolan on humanism in the darkness
Can books still change the world? At the Venice Biennale, the Irish artist contrasts Renaissance dreams with our current crisis
Anish Kapoor’s dark matter
The Hayward Gallery’s new exhibition showcases artworks so black that they seem to undermine the very rules by which we perceive the world
The night New York discovered Frida Kahlo
How a small Manhattan exhibition in 1938 helped launch one of the most celebrated artists of the modern age
Knitters against Trump
Women are getting the needle with the president – but history shows many examples of the use of knitting as a tool for protest
Paris’s bridge of sighs: When the world’s largest artwork met the weather
Visiting JR’s La Caverne du Pont Neuf, the installation a storm couldn’t stop
Books
Why Britain still doesn’t know how to treat George Michael
Biographer Sathnam Sanghera on our unresolved problems with the late singer
Rejection, the shocking book I recommended too soon
For two weeks, I told everyone about the book I was reading – including an older lady on a train. And then I read one of its stories…
The day the tanks came for my parents
Tari Lang’s memoir discusses growing up under Indonesia’s military dictatorship while much of society carried on as normal
JD Vance’s books are an unholy mess
The vice president has gone from hillbilly to hypocrite, and Communion exposes the gulf between belief and behaviour
Experts in a Dying Field, the indie rock novel that understands why bands fail
Patrick Freyne’s creations The Heathens star in a book that’s hilarious and heart-wrenching
What the sitcom never told you about the real Dad’s Army
With guns, grenades, flamethrowers and sabotage training, the Home Guard were no laughing matter
Music
Why Britain still doesn’t know how to treat George Michael
Biographer Sathnam Sanghera on our unresolved problems with the late singer
What happens when a rapper becomes a shit-posting prime minister?
The problem for the hip outsider is that, if you suddenly become the most powerful person in the country, your old ways don’t look the same any more
Experts in a Dying Field, the indie rock novel that understands why bands fail
Patrick Freyne’s creations The Heathens star in a book that’s hilarious and heart-wrenching
Andy Burnham likes decent music. That doesn’t guarantee he’ll be a decent PM
The PM-in-waiting’s playlist choices are sound. But then so were Boris Johnson’s
We regret to inform you that Tommy Robinson has a new podcast
The extremist thug, agitator and convicted fraudster has somehow managed to get his show on to Spotify. If his first episode is anything to go by, it’ll be a downpour of race-baiting poison
We are failing: Rod Stewart, Morrissey and the indescribable hell of the late gig cancellation
A dash from a scrapped concert to a Scotland match has piled on the disappointment for ticket-holders. What would Mark E Smith have made of it all?
Film
How a Liverpool fan fell in love with Cantona
A new documentary captures the conundrum of the ultimate individual in a team sport
Growing old with Captain Kirk: Why Star Trek has aged better than Star Wars
Gene Roddenberry’s franchise understands ageing, loss and friendship in ways George Lucas’s never has
Inside the notebooks that built Bruce Lee
The martial arts star wrote down his philosophies and hopes as a means of enacting them
From Don Corleone to Donald Trump: David Thomson puts the movies on trial
Our greatest film writer’s new book says that Hollywood has made us all complicit in populism’s rise and intellectualism’s fall
The activists trying to save cinema, one screen at a time
Over 2,500 of Italy’s cinemas have closed since the pandemic. But a group of film enthusiasts has a plan to turn things around
The Odyssey and our summer of myth
Homer’s epic speaks powerfully to any age troubled by anxiety that the notion of home, reciprocity and social stability is in jeopardy
Theatre
Sandra Oh kills it in a West End show of rare power
A modern update of Molière’s The Misanthrope sees the Killing Eve star battling conformity and cancellation
Gary Oldman’s Beckett masterclass
The Slow Horses star follows Gambon and Hurt in Krapp’s Last Tape – and outshines them both
Was Andy Kaufman the most creative comedian of all time?
The Taxi star revelled in creating chaos and confusion
What if Thatcher had been assassinated?
A stage adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s book about an killer and the Tory PM questions both violent rhetoric and violence itself
Has Jacob Rees-Mogg really been banned from ‘woke’ theatres?
The former cabinet minster moans theatres won’t stage his one-man show because they’re woke. Might it be because they’d struggle to sell tickets?
The chaotic magic of Rebecca Lucy Taylor
The singer also known as Self Esteem is phenomenal as she follows revival in a revival of David Hare’s Teeth ’n’ Smiles
Great Lives
Inside the notebooks that built Bruce Lee
The martial arts star wrote down his philosophies and hopes as a means of enacting them
Sam Neill found a different way to be famous
He appeared in some of the biggest TV and movies of our time, but being a Kiwi, he became a quiet kind of megastar
The night New York discovered Frida Kahlo
How a small Manhattan exhibition in 1938 helped launch one of the most celebrated artists of the modern age
Why Diogo Jota will always be Liverpool’s number 20
His final goal captured everything fans loved about the man who called himself ‘a small guy from Gondomar’
The tragedy of Majed Abu Maraheel, Palestine’s first Olympic hero
His message of peace brought hope to the world – then war in Gaza played a part in his death
The secrets of the Iron Sheik, the man America loved to hate
The cartoonish villain who turned to cocaine was once an Olympic-calibre wrestler who helped US athletes win gold