Mark Fisher: Postcapitalist Desire - The Final Lectures review - imagining the alternative

★★★★ MARK FISHER: POSTCAPITALIST DESIRE - THE FINAL LECTURES An eye-opening exploration of capitalism and desire

An eye-opening exploration of the relationship between capitalism and desire

Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures is a collection of transcripts, recording weekly group lectures delivered by Mark Fisher to his students at Goldsmiths, University of London during the 2016/17 academic year.

Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, Royal Court online review – the news, but better

★★★★ LIVING NEWSPAPER: A COUNTER NARRATIVE, ROYAL COURT The news, but better 

The Royal Court’s experimental piece is political theatre at its finest and fiercest

Edition 2 of Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, an experimental new piece of online theatre from the Royal Court, doesn’t mess around. Within minutes, a cry of "Tory scum" is echoing around the Jerwood Theatre – the refrain of an anarchic musical number presided over by a mannequin painted blue, wearing a shaggy blond wig.

Overflow, Bush Theatre review – fear, fury and fun

★★★★ OVERFLOW, BUSH THEATRE Travis Alabanza's new monologue is a shout out for trans and non-gender-conforming rights

New monologue is a shout out for trans and non-gender-conforming rights

Travis Alabanza is black, trans, queer and proud. And they’ve got a lot to be proud about. In 2016, they were the youngest recipient of the artist in residence post on the Tate workshop programme, and two years later starred in Chris Goode’s wildly overblown adaptation of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee.

Andrey Kurkov: Grey Bees review - light Ukrainian odyssey, with bite

★★★★ ANDREY KURKOV: GREY BEES Light Ukrainian odyssey, with bite

Journey of a beekeeper lays bare the simultaneous severity and stupidity of conflict

This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humour, has written a modern-day odyssey, with a return that is ambiguously hopeful. Grey Bees follows a year in the life of Sergey Sergeyich, a retired and lonely beekeeper, keeping the fire burning with his sole neighbour, Pashka, in Little Starhorodivka, a village that sits uneasily inbetween two sides of an entrenched war.

theartsdesk Q&A: Mick Talbot of The Style Council

THEARTSDESK Q&A: MICK TALBOT The keyboard don discusses the ups and downs of life in The Style Council

The keyboard don discusses the very Eighties ups and downs of life in The Style Council

Following the break-up of The Jam in 1982, Mick Talbot (b 1958) was chosen by Paul Weller as his sparring partner in a new band, The Style Council. Talbot, a keyboard player from south London, had flourished amid the late-Seventies Mod revival, initially in the Merton Parkas, with his brother Danny, but also in The Chords, and even appearing on a couple of The Jam’s records.

Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins review - a fitting tribute to a political hellraiser

Fast-paced and funny documentary about a legendary American newspaper columnist

It’s a brave film distributor who releases a documentary about an American journalist in the UK at the best of times, let alone in the middle of a pandemic, so first salute goes to Eve Gabereau at Modern Films for giving Raise Hell a proper launch.

10 Questions for Poet and Critic Rebecca Tamás

10 QUESTIONS FOR POET AND CRITIC REBECCA TAMAS On 'Strangers' and the urgent interconnectedness of the human and non-human

On 'Strangers' and the urgent interconnectedness of the human and non-human

Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman is a powerful invitation to rethink, to doubt and to engage. Beginning among the Diggers’ tilled earth in 1649 and the eco-socialist "watermelon" juices that soil still stirs, the book makes an urgent argument for recognising our uneasy intimacy with the nonhuman.

theartsdesk Q&A: Sally Anne Gross and Dr George Musgrave, authors of 'Can Music Make You Sick?'

Q&A: SALLY ANNE GROSS, DR GEORGE MUSGRAVE The authors of incisive new study 'Can Music Make You Sick?'

On World Mental Health Day we meet the authors of an incisive new study of music and musicians

Today is World Mental Health Day and of course that means an awful lot of hugs and homilies, thoughts and prayers, deep-breathing exercises and it’s-good-to-talk platitudes from people speaking from positions of immense privilege – ranging from the well-meaning to outright grifters.

Bob Woodward: Rage review - terror and tyranny in the White House

★★★★ BOB WOODWARD: RAGE Terror and tyranny in the White House

Tales from Crazytown

“Build the wall!” exhorted Trump, at rally after rally back in the days when we’d all acknowledged his moral repugnancy but still believed he could never attain the presidency. And Trump has indeed built a wall, one that divides Republicans from Democrats in ways unimaginable even during the psychodrama of the Nixon years; a wall that has divided America in ways that will take a generation or more to heal – as Boris Johnson and his Brexit project has done in Britain.

Naomi Klein: On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal review - an unapologetic manifesto

★★★★ NAOMI KLEIN - ON FIRE: THE BURNING CASE FOR A GREEN NEW DEAL An unapologetic manifesto

Klein’s radical remedy for reversing climate destruction

On Fire brings together a decade’s worth of dispatches from the frontline of the climate disaster – spanning the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill (“a violent wound in the living organism that is Earth itself”), devastating tropical cyclones in Puerto Rico and choking wildfires in British Columbia.