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My highlight

Writers reflect on their current cultural interests
  • Detail of Samuel Pepys by John Hayls, 1666

    My highlight: the Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution exhibition by Michael Prodger

    The Pepys exhibition at the National Maritime Museum offers a cabinet of curiosities that reflects his extraordinary fecundity
  • SHOESTRING COMPOSITE
Shoestring award
Philip Pullman and Mark Haddon have created a one-off award for the veteran children's author Allan Ahlberg. It's called the Shoestring award, and the prize is a book with specially made drawings from the great and the good of the children's books world.
20-10-2015
Photograph by Martin Godwin

    Mark Haddon: a celebration of Allan Ahlberg

    Quentin Blake, Roddy Doyle and Chris Riddell were among writers and illustrators who creatively saluted the venerable children’s author Ahlberg
  • <em>The Road Is Open for Humans</em> by Konstantin Ivanov, poster 1960.

    My highlight: Cosmonauts at the Science Museum by Francis Spufford

    This beautiful display captures the Soviet space programme as a place for licensed dreaming, and features space relics never before allowed out of Russia
  • Joanna Vanderham as Marian in the BBC adaptation of The Go-Between

    My highlight: The Go-Between by Jenny Turner

    Less arty than the 1971 film, the new BBC version lets the tensions within LP Hartley’s novel emerge: land, money, war and revolution as well as sex
  • Detail from Buddha and Jesus drawing manga by Nakamura Hikaru.

    My highlight: Manga now by Timon Screech

    Unlike its equivalents in the west, manga in Japan is taken seriously as art. The new exhibition at the British Museum showcases the images of Tetsuya Chiba, Yukinobu Hoshino and Hikaru Nakamura
  • James Norton and Holliday Grainger inthe BBC's  Lady Chatterley's Lover

    My highlight: Lady Chatterley’s Lover

    DH Lawrence’s gamekeeper has cleaned up his act and Sir Clifford is a dish in the BBC’s new morally complex adaptation
  • Phoebe Fox as Vanessa Bell and Lydia Leonard as Virginia Woolf in the 1st episode of Life in Squares

    My highlight: Life in Squares

    One corset is removed while another is thrown out the window … there is much to fit in and much to look forward to with the BBC’s upcoming Bloomsbury drama
  • Inside Out

    Inside Out by Emma Brockes

    With its jokes about abstract thought, this Pixar/Disney journey inside an 11-year-old’s mind is as funny as it is inventive
  • Mad Men

    My highlight: Mad Men by Bee Wilson

    The Eames chairs and hour-glass dresses are a visual treat, but it’s really all about Jon Hamm’s performance as a man sickened by his womanising and in thrall to his own pretty lies
  • Eric Ravilious

    My highlight: Eric Ravilious by Michael Prodger

    An exhibition of Ravilious’ watercolours at the Dulwich Picture Gallery shows how his pastoral vision of an English Neverland remains powerfully evocative
  • Matthias Schoenaerts and Michelle Williams in <em>Suite Française</em>

    My highlight: Suite Française by Caroline Moorehead

    Kristin Scott Thomas and Michelle Williams bring Irène Némirovsky’s superb novel about occupied France movingly to life in Saul Dibb’s excellent film
  • Heathcliff meets Mr Darcy … Aidan Turner in Poldark.

    My Highlight: Poldark

    Starring a brooding Aidan Turner, this big budget TV adaptation of Winston Mawdsley Graham’s Cornish novels has crashing surf, dramatic cliffs and glorious landscapes
  • Leonora Carrington's The Giantess

    My highlight: Leonora Carrington

    Ahead of the Tate Liverpool exhibition, Chloe Aridjis is inspired by Carrington’s oracular animal hybrids, her great natural and mythical worlds – and her fierce authenticity
  • Michael Gambon

    My highlight: The Casual Vacancy

    The adaptation of JK Rowling’s novel may have a softened ending and Farrow & Ball gloss, but it remains true to her realist vision and allegiance to the young and socially disadvantaged
  • Marlene Dumas | Tate Modern 5 February - 10 May 2015

    My highlight: Marlene Dumas

    Colm Tóibín finds stark beauty in the South African-born painter’s dreamlike images
  • 'Mirth', one of the 22 drawings in The Witches and Old Women Album, at the Courtauld in 2015.

    My highlight: Goya

    Why 2015 is the year finally to decide whether Goya was high-minded or simply fascinated by evil. By James Hall
  • Anna Chancellor, Steve Pemberton and Miranda Richardson in Mapp and Lucia

    My highlight: Mapp and Lucia by Nina Stibbe

    I was worried when I heard there was to be a new TV adaptation of EF Benson’s wonderful novels of interwar snobbery, but Miranda Richardson and Anna Chancellor are a credit to the great man. By Nina Stibbe
  • Sarah Koenig, Serial's creator

    My highlight: Serial

    Sarah Koenig’s addictive series about a 1999 murder conviction has raised the bar for both podcasts and old-fashioned investigative reporting
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