She died before she was 40, leaving behind a body of blazingly original short fiction set in America’s segregated south. But her reputation has been tarnished by accusations of racism.

A month before she died aged 39, on 3 August 1964, of complications from the autoimmune disease lupus, the American writer Flannery O’Connor wrote from her home in Milledgeville, Georgia to a regular correspondent, the academic and nun Sister Mariella Gable: “The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place.”

The “wolf” that O’Connor refers to is her illness, the name of which derives from the Latin. The disease can be mild, but in its worst form it is systemic, causing not only inflammation, chronic fatigue, muscle weakness and skin rashes, but also permanent tissue damage. In her last years, O’Connor could only move around by means of crutches, tending to her beloved pet peacocks. “I can write for one hour a day, and my, my, do I like my one hour. I eat it up like it was filet mignon.”

Exhibition opens this week in Taunton Castle, where mass death sentences were infamously issued during Bloody Assizes

A fresh look at an ill-fated 17th-century uprising that haunts the English West Country – and may hold lessons for the world today – is taking place close to the spot where many of the rebels were condemned to death.

An exhibition at the Museum of Somerset tells the story of the Monmouth Rebellion, which ended with defeat for the rebels who fought alongside the charismatic Duke of Monmouth, with many condemned to death at the notorious Bloody Assizes led by George Jeffreys, the Lord Chancellor.

The One Day actor will star in Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s Porn Play, one of four new premieres announced by the London theatre

Ambika Mod is to star as an academic addicted to violent pornography in a new play at the Royal Court in London. Mod, best known for her screen performances in One Day and This Is Going to Hurt, will take on her highest profile theatre role to date in Porn Play, written by Sophia Chetin-Leuner and directed by Josie Rourke.

Billed as “funny, unsettling and honest”, it opens in November at the Royal Court’s smaller Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. Chetin-Leuner, whose play This Might Not Be It was set in a mental health unit and staged at the Bush last year, said: “Ever since I was a teenager, going to see plays at the Royal Court has shaped my ideals and purpose of who I want to be as a writer – so it’s a terrifying privilege to have Porn Play debuting here.” The play was shortlisted for Soho theatre’s Verity Bargate award in 2022. Chetin-Leuner said she began writing it to explore the effects of pornography on women but that it has “evolved into something much more delicate and intricate over the years”.

Academic who died in 1987 is thought to be responsible for documents that vanished over a 30-year period

Scotland’s national archive has traced the mysterious disappearance of more than 3,000 historical documents over a period of 30 years to a history professor with an all-consuming interest in stamps.

The theft began to unravel when a National Records of Scotland archivist attended an auction in London in 1994. There, he discovered that 200 of the items for sale belonged to the archive, some still marked with their NRS reference numbers.

Set in 1980s Spain, actor Paz Vega’s subtly affecting directing debut shows a family suffering under an abusive father, but is warmed by optimism and compassion

Spanish actor Paz Vega makes her directing debut with this sensitive portrait of domestic abuse and patriarchy in 1980s Spain. It’s told through the eyes of seven-year-old Rita (Sofía Allepuz), whose mum, Mari (played by Vega) is trapped in a violent marriage. We see the world how Rita sees it: filled with of moments of joy and discovery; her sense of wonder adds tenderness and hope to the story. It’s never voyeuristic (the violence happens almost entirely off screen), but Rita is effective at evoking how each member of the family is brutalised by abuse, living in a constant state of hypervigilance.

Rita works hard. Her little seven-year-old hands scrub, carry heavy plates and wash dishes to make her mother’s life a little easier. Rita’s five-year-old brother Lolo (Alejandro Escamilla), is anxious and timid, much to the irritation of their taxi driver dad José Manuel (Roberto Álamo). He is a man clenched with anger and frustration. “You’re an idiot,” he snaps at his wife with a contempt and fury that made me wince. Vega is terrific as Mari, a woman who is tender and loving with her children, but seems to have switched off some part of herself in order to live with José Manuel; she is on auto-pilot, drained and exhausted.

The Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg’s wildly imaginative epic The Devils was so extraordinary it demanded another viewing – or two

The Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg’s production of The Devils , based on the novel by Dostoevsky, is one of the extraordinary theatrical achievements of the last 40 years and one of the great experiences of my life – theatrical and otherwise. With a running time of around nine hours, it was also one of the longest. And I’ve seen it three times. That’s a lot of hours to give but none of them were wasted.

The first two occasions were in 1998 when the Maly played the Barbican in London. There were two options: watch it in three sections across three evenings, or do it all in one go – three hours per act, with an hour’s break between each. Being young, filled with Dostoevskian fervour, and still in possession of a stoic bladder, I did both.

A teenager hides 12 Jews in a basement under the nose of her Nazi boss in this tactful English-language drama

Here is an extraordinary true-life tale. For more than two years during the second world war, a teenager named Irene Gut kept 12 Polish Jews safe from the Nazis, hidden in a basement right under the nose of her boss, a high-ranking Nazi officer. Following the war, Gut emigrated to America and never spoke a word about her wartime experiences until the mid 1970s. Now the story of her remarkable courage and heroism is told very politely in an English-language drama that feels a little too tactful in places to really say anything about the horrors of Nazism.

Sophie Nélisse plays Irena, a Polish trainee nurse forced into slave labour by the Germans following the occupation in 1939, put to work first in a factory then a hotel. Then Nazi officer Rügemer (Dougray Scott) picks her to be his housekeeper – and when she moves in to his sprawling villa, Irena also sneaks in a group of Jewish prisoners whom she has been supervising at the hotel. When Rügemer is out during the day, the hideaways come out of the cellar to help cook and clean – anything to stop him making good on his promise to bring in more staff. The film doesn’t linger too deeply on the experiences of 12 mostly young Jewish people: the terror and the boredom and the tensions they must have felt, crammed in together month after month.

Residents of a Brussels apartment block contend with Nazi occupation; the existential threats to humanity explored; and a lively study of national and political boundaries

Alice Austen
Bloomsbury, £16.99 , pp368

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The American painter built a multimillion-dollar empire but a new documentary highlights the dark side of a complex artist

Thirteen years after his death from an overdose of alcohol and valium, the American painter Thomas Kinkade’s brand lives on. The original Thomas Kinkade store in Carmel, California, still operates, and the official Kinkade Instagram account has a tidy, if modest, 67,000 followers. A recent partnership with Disney features, among other things, a 16-month calendar showing some of the Disney empire’s best-known faces in fantastical landscapes.

Still, this is but a shadow of the massive, multimedia Kinkade operation that reportedly netted over $2bn in total retail sales in 2004, licensing its images to everything from plates to calendars to greeting cards to actual Thomas Kinkade cottages that fans could live in. If you happened to be a sentient human being during the 1990s and 2000s, chances are you have at least some cultural memory of this artist who was as ubiquitous as could be. (Kinkade was fond of bragging that he reached the heights of everywhereness that Andy Warhol could only dream of.)