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Demand the Impossible review – powerful punk rage at injustices of police violence and spycops scandal | Stage

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Performances that dramatise protest can feel a little futile, presenting activism as an aesthetic experience while the real world rumbles on outside. Not so for Common/Wealth’s Demand the Impossible. Described as part-performance, part-punk gig and part-sensory experience, this is a striking work.Structured around Taylor Edmond’s text of short episodic monologues, it resists an easy poeticism, instead focusing on the objectively descriptive. This is of the everyday, where injustice occurs around the peeling of apples, the making of sandwiches and the eating of crisps. Threading together the narratives of a Black Lives Matter activist, a blacklisted construction worker and an environmental…

‘A sparkle that extends beyond fiction’: readers on what Jilly Cooper meant to them | Jilly Cooper

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‘An absolute delight’I was the manager of Books Etc in Oxford Street, where Jilly Cooper’s novel Polo was launched in 1991, with polo-dressed senior publishers posing in the window. Jilly visited our shop several times for signings and she was our favourite author visitor. She always spoke to all the staff, brought a gift for staff with her and always wrote us a note of thanks afterwards. Lovely with customers and just an absolute delight. Judith Denwood, retired bookseller, Hastings ‘A week later, a gorgeous wooden postcard arrived’Jilly Cooper’s postcard to Kitty. Photograph: Guardian CommunityI read Riders in the summer…

The Life of a Showgirl is a massive hit – and massively divisive. What should Taylor Swift do next? | Taylor Swift

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Laura Snapes Taylor Swift’s 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl (TLOAS), has been a smash statistical success. She’s broken records that she previously set, and in the US has now beaten Adele for the most sales in a single week. The cinematic release party this weekend grossed $34m in the US and an additional $13m worldwide. But it’s second only to her 20-year-old debut – written in her teens – as the worst reviewed album of her catalogue, with a 70% approval average on Metacritic. What are the successes and failures of this record?Alexis Petridis The success part is…

A drag queen stands at a site of violence: Lee-Ann Olwage’s best photograph | Photography

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I have always been interested in gender and identity stories. In South Africa, we have a strong liberal constitution on paper for queer rights, but the reality on the streets – the hate crimes, the animosity in the workplace and in social settings – is very different. I was curious about where people could go not only to feel safe but to feel celebrated for who they are, and feel truly embraced. That led me to the drag pageant scene.I would go to photograph pageants every weekend, and every Monday I would get messages from the people I’d photographed asking…

That’s me in the £45m Hockney! The man in the masterpiece relives sitting for David back in the heady LA party days | David Hockney

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‘Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!” Laughter explodes down the line from California. “It was a very long time ago!” says the painter Don Bachardy. His voice is high and rasping. Listening to him, you could be forgiven for thinking that the late Truman Capote was still with us. As for what happened “a very long time ago”, Bachardy is referring to the parties he threw with his partner, the British novelist Christopher Isherwood. Their home in Adelaide Drive, Santa Monica, was a salon thronged by movie stars and writers as well as Bachardy’s fellow artists.“Yes, we had a good time…

The turbulent history of the union jack

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Stewart continues: "This was another means of smoothing national sensibilities by ensuring that the precedence given to the Irish saltire – because it lay over the Scottish saltire – was balanced by the Scottish saltire having precedence in the more prestigious half of the design." The flag was first flown on 1 January 1801, when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland came into being. Since the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, the red has represented Northern Ireland.AlamyThe Death of Major Peirson by John Singleton Copley (1783) portrays a moment of British victory against a French invasion of Jersey (Credit:…

The office worker who became the first person ever to appear on TV

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Enter William Taynton, a 20-year-old office boy who was working downstairs from Baird's makeshift laboratory. He told the BBC 40 years later to the day: "Mr Baird came rushing down full of excitement and almost dragged me out of my office to go to his small laboratory. I think he was so excited at the time that words didn't come. He almost grabbed me and wanted me to get upstairs as quickly as possible."When Taynton came across the ramshackle state of Baird's laboratory, he said he felt like running straight back down the stairs. First, he had to navigate his…

11 of the best TV shows to watch this October

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Riot Women premieres 22 October on Britbox in the US and in October on BBC1 in the UKWarner Bros9. It: Welcome to DerryOnly in Stephen King's world could a welcome message sound so menacing. Pennywise, the evil clown played by Bill Skarsgård in the films It (2017) and It: Chapter Two (2019) had to start somewhere, and Skarsgård returns in this prequel series, based on the "interlude" chapters in the 1986 King novel that inspired the films. The show is set in 1962 in Derry, Maine (far from the Ireland of Derry Girls) where a couple with a young son…

Why Anna Magnani is the overlooked ‘goddess’ of Italian cinema

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Less than a year earlier, Teresa Gullace, a six-month-pregnant mother of five had been shot in Rome by a Nazi soldier after she waved at her captive husband. In the film, Francesco shouts "Teresa", as an homage. At the time, Magnani was also suffering, as her son had contracted polio.An unconventional star Magnani's communication of this raw pain on screen is perhaps one reason why she is less popular in the US today than other iconic Italian actresses. "Anna is the embodiment of a country that came out of the war with the courage of showing its wounds," says De Bernardinis.…

The pioneering photographer who captured the horror of World War Two

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Miller's headstrong creativity is evoked by her wry quotes; she once explained of her work: "It was a matter of getting out on a damn limb, and sawing it off behind you." The urgency, audaciousness, and unexpected compassion that defines so much of her photography is also inextricably linked to her personal experience.She was born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York State; she began her global adventures in her youth, though her ultimate home was Farleys House in the East Sussex countryside, where she moved in 1949 with her husband, British painter and curator Roland Penrose, and their infant son…