Letter by William DeHart Hubbard, first black athlete to win an individual gold medal at tournament, is arriving in UK for first time ever For many people, the 1924 Paris Olympics will – thanks to the 1981 film Chariots of Fire – always be associated with slow-motion images of British runners beating the Americans against the odds, while Vangelis’s haunting score plays in the background. But an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, timed to coincide with the event’s return to the French capital, aims to show that the Parisian games a century ago were a turning point, not just for ..read more

£65,000 gift will not restore the full, 10-day occasion but organisers say it will make pop-up events possible Aye Write, the Glasgow literary festival that was cancelled last month after its funding application was turned down by Creative Scotland has announced that it will present a slimmed programme after an “unexpected, but very welcome” £65,000 donation. The donation, from a foundation set up by the late lottery winner Colin Weir, will help fund a series of pop-up events throughout 2024, featuring authors including David Nicholls, Val McDermid and Lionel Shriver ..read more

The Oscar-winner’s powerful documentary proves how fragile the earth’s ecosystems are. From angry hippos to salmon swimming on tarmac, it is truly valuable television Our Living World begins with a cheesy inspirational quote: “Realise that everything connects to everything else.” Leonardo da Vinci said that, possibly. Soon, this nature series has glowing blue lines running across the screen, and Cate Blanchett on the voiceover, authoritatively announcing that the planet’s species are dependent on each other in ways we cannot immediately see and might not have imagined. It sounds as if this pro ..read more

The photographer turned painter specializes in images of Black female solitude, luxuriating in the importance of relaxing As a painter, Danielle Mckinney has just one subject: Black women in moments of repose. From that singular basis she has managed to produce years of acclaimed artwork, developing an enviable style that has drawn the attention of, among others, Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Her new show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, titled Quiet Storm, offers 12 works that suggestively combine elements of exhalation and simmering intensity. Hold your Breath, one of the displayed works, is as good a start ..read more

In this week’s newsletter: Great game adaptations are increasingly high-budget fan-fiction, thanks to a generation of writers who actually understand games • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here I am a few episodes from the end of the series Fallout on Prime Video. It’s funny and gory, at times sentimental and at other times ridiculous. In other words, it’s just like the games, which veer between quiet, tragic moments exploring the vestiges of America, and being chased down a hill by irradiated scorpions because you’ve run out of ammo. Fallout’s ensemble cast – with ..read more

‘This was taken in Qaanaaq, one of the world’s most northern cities. It gets 24-hour sun during the summer months. I went because my name originates there’ In the summer of 2023, I was living in Qaanaaq, Greenland, one of the most northern cities in the world. It’s a tundra: there are no plants, it barely rains and, in the summer months, there are 24 hours of sun. During the night, the weather is calmer and more colourful – by day, it’s hardcore and very bright. This was taken just before midnight. I could hear kids playing tag outside, then they got tired and lay down. I went out and asked if ..read more

Orlando Whitfield was a student when he became best friends with Inigo Philbrick, ‘the art world’s Bernie Madoff’. He talks about how their decade of hustling would lead one to a breakdown – and the other to jail • ‘The day we tried to bag a Banksy’: read an extract from Whitfield’s explosive exposé Orlando Whitfield is a youngish man, shy, with a reddish beard. His hands are aggressively tattooed, as if they’d been laid, backs down, on wet newspaper. The ink is a form of armour, he says, like his pranking brand of humour (for a while his iCloud hotspot was “Lord Lucan’s iPhone”). But he’s ear ..read more

Zany caper follows Jo Hartley as a big-veg enthusiast defending her patch from elaborate ill-doings Chaos reigns in this strange, funny and amiably anarchic mockumentary about dirty tricks in the cutthroat world of competitive marrow-growing, written and co-directed by film-maker Brook Driver. Maybe the script could have gone through another couple of drafts, but that might have removed some of the flavour. As it is, it feels like Thomas Pynchon had emailed Ricky Gervais an idea he’d had for a British comedy, and the result certainly has some laughs. Jo Hartley (a stalwart of Shane Meadows’s m ..read more

After slogging through poverty, indifference and Hannah Montana impersonations, the US singer is an award-winning sensation and selling out a UK tour. She explains why her genre is going mainstream like never before You get the sense the country music establishment really had no choice but to embrace Lainey Wilson: that she wasn’t going anywhere until they did. When the singer-songwriter arrived in Nashville in 2011, she parked her 20-foot bumper pull trailer on a studio’s lawn and anchored it with rocks. Then 19, she had lived country music all her life. But Nashville is what they call a “10 ..read more

The story of two historians unleashing evil while recording a song is a strong idea and there are good moments and performances, but it is too chaotic and unfocused to resonate Paul Duane is the film-maker who in 2011 made Barbaric Genius, a gripping documentary portrait of ex-convict, ex-vagrant and tournament chess player John Healy, whose memoir The Grass Arena is a classic of outsider art literature. Now Duane has given us this horror film which, though it begins with interesting subversive and satirical ideas, and an interesting allusion to Guillermo del Toro, finally becomes, for me, sim ..read more