🔗 He contains the whole of literature: is Dickens better than Shakespeare?

🔗 Asteroid City review – Wes Anderson’s 1950s sci-fi is an exhilarating triumph of pure style

🔗 Manic Street Preachers: The band feels like something you can go into battle with against the world

As they release their 15th album, the Manic Street Preachers are as fired up as ever. They talk about tech bros, stealing hotel shampoo and four decades of combining friendship with being in a band

🔗 Maria by Callas movie review & film summary (2018) | Roger Ebert

🔗 ‘I have just bought my first gun’: the war diary of late Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina

🔗 Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet is pretentious — but what fun

🔗 Stoicism & Buddhism: Lessons, Similarities and Differences

🔗 Luca is the progenitor of all life on Earth. But its genesis has implications far beyond our planet

Luca – short for the last universal common ancestor, the progenitor of all known life on Earth – seems to have been born 4.2bn years ago.

🔗 Phish: Tiny Desk Concert 🎵

🔗 Gukesh Dommaraju becomes youngest world chess champion after horrific Ding Liren blunder

🔗 I’m intrigued by failure: Kim Deal on death, addiction and releasing her debut solo album at 63

🔗 ‘We recognise it in this very primal way’: Stephen Fry, Brie Larson, Chris Ofili and more on why we can’t get enough of Greek mythology

Love, death, grief, power, revenge: Greek tragedies get to the essence of the human experience. Here, writers and artists select their favourite plays, music and films inspired by the classics, from The Hunger Games to a Santana hit

🔗 I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe: what Blade Runner 2049’s dystopia tells us about 2017

🔗 Blade Runner 2049 review - a future classic

The sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic manages to be both visually stunning and philosophically profound

🔗 Tears in rain? Why Blade Runner is timeless

🔗 Identity of casts of victims at Pompeii not all they seem, research suggests

Ancient DNA challenges prevailing interpretations of the Pompeii plaster casts

🔗 The Cure: Songs of a Lost World review – as promised, ‘very, very doom and gloom’

The band’s first album in 16 years finds Robert Smith and co on reliably melancholy form

🔗 The Cure: Songs of a Lost World review – dark, personal and their best since Disintegration

The band are at an artistic peak on their first album in 16 years: movingly melancholic, with a punchy sound to match the lyrics’ emotional impact

🔗 John Keats statue to be unveiled near his birthplace in London’s Moorgate

Martin Jennings – whose previous public sculptures include John Betjeman, George Orwell and Philip Larkin – has based his bronze on a life cast of the poet, taken when he was 21

🔗 Venice without the crowds: the inside story by Tracy Chevalier