A terrific second novel from the British author of Assembly examines what it means to be truthful – and who really benefits when facts come to light

Miriam Leonard, AKA Lenny, one of a tight core of characters at the heart of Natasha Brown’s terrific second novel, would probably dislike Universality intensely. Then again, she might love it, because an unpredictability of opinion is her stock in trade: a newspaper columnist who has recently sashayed from the comment pages of the Telegraph to those of the Observer , her views on class, race, sex, the economy and, latterly, the iniquity of diversity, equity and inclusion programmes are uncompromisingly held and vociferously broadcast, but only opaquely coherent. To keep moving is the trick.

Lenny is making a better fist of survival than many of those around her, with her exceptionally neat formula for wooing readers, which involves alighting on a news story and making “a lofty comparison”: “Obscure elements of European history are best, but a Russian novel or philosophical theory can be just as effective.” Certainly, she is faring better than disgraced banker Richard, cast out of his shiny-paned City office and his home in the Surrey stockbroker belt after a long read in which he has enthusiastically and, it turns out, foolhardily participated goes viral; the piece’s author, struggling freelance journalist Hannah, is briefly propelled to something approaching professional and personal respectability but finds herself similarly becalmed once the click-frenzy moves on. And neither of them would want to swap places with Jake, Lenny’s desperate and ne’er-do-well son (“a mass of wild hair, shambolic clothing and lifelong unaccountability”, she thinks grimly as she once again pushes him away), or with Pegasus, the aspiring communard whose utopian dream has irretrievably fractured.

Apparently we’re in ‘the Age of Anti-Ambition’ – but the ick we feel towards those who are openly wanting is misplaced

A series of photos that circulated around awards season made the internet roundly do its nut. I will describe them, and you will see how our reactions show that earnestness has gone violently out of style. The first picture accompanied a quote from Jeremy Strong responding to his Oscar nomination. He’d put out a long statement saying this was the “realisation of a lifelong dream” and shared a photo of himself as a kid in 1993, when he spent the night “on cold metal bleachers” outside the Academy Awards to watch the nominees arrive. “I have not lost that feeling of excitement… I have devoted my life to the attempt to do genuine work that would be worthy of this honour.”

The second was an Instagram post where Strong’s Succession co-star Kieran Culkin reacted to his competing nomination with champagne on a balcony in Paris, and the phrase, “Let’s fucking gooooooo.”

The trend for cultural reappraisal could risk upholding the very ideas it aims to dismantle

‘My quarrel with the English language,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare , had been “that the language reflected none of my experience.” And so “I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression”.

Then, he “began to see the matter in quite another way”: “Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.”

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Charlotte Church has lived her life in the full glare of publicity, rising from child star to tabloid target. Now, happier and more free than ever, she’s found her feet – and her voice – at her healing retreat in the Welsh valleys

When Charlotte Church arrives, she starts to cry. “I break down,” she says, “every time I reach here. It’s the first thing I do when I set foot on this soil.” It’s a two-hour drive from her home in Barry to The Dreaming, the retreat centre she opened in 2023, a pilgrimage across Bannau Brycheiniog and into the myth-steeped hills of the Elan Valley in Powys, central Wales. “Two to three weeks,” she’s explaining, icy ground crunching underfoot, “is the longest I can stay away before I start clucking. As I get closer, I feel myself relaxing, a calm coming over me, my nervous system resetting.” That bodily response, she’s sure, is physiological. Tears stream. “This land holds me like nothing else. It feels like coming home; I’m enveloped here.”

It’s early January when I visit. Through the small market town of Rhayader and out into dramatic landscapes, snow-dusted peaks atop rolling hills. A hand-carved sign marks a single-track turning. Through morning mist, The Dreaming comes into view: a three-storey manor almost built into the valley, flanked by moss-lined rocks and woodland. Fresh from being photographed alfresco, Church greets me outdoors: “It’s bloody lush, love, isn’t it?”

While working as an art teacher in the 90s, the Moroccan photographer collaborated with his students to play with the confines of the educational system

No doubt you can sympathise with at least one of the pupils in the image. She has her head down, working hard, so bowed in thought her face is almost pressed right against her paper. A few seats down, a boy adopts a similar pose. One girl has her ankles crossed, while another has hers splayed. Across the room, one girl’s shoes are practical, while another’s are oddly adult, sandals with heels, hand-me-downs, maybe. You remember how imagination allowed you to disappear, to escape, to take leave of the four walls of the classroom, of the uncomfortable wooden chair and desk at which you tried not to fidget.

Or were you the boy breaking the peace, wild and unruly, hanging over a table while lying flat on your stomach, legs dangling, fixing us with your cheeky gaze, as in this image from the Moroccan photographer Hicham Benohoud’s book The Classroom ? The images were taken between 1994 and 2000 while Benohoud worked as an art teacher and found himself, like the students, stifled by the educational system. The teacher who inspires by introducing simple freedoms into a rigid educational setting is a familiar cinematic trope ( To Sir, With Love , Dangerous Minds , Entre les Murs , AKA The Class ). Benohoud makes it his own in quiet black-and-white photographs that show how students, when given the opportunity to play and experiment, can redefine their surroundings with the leanest of creative means. Chairs and tables become frames within frames, reveal and conceal faces, as do paper cutouts held up playfully. Strings and tape, cardboard and fabric become interventions in space or extensions of the body, curtains and shrouds, places to hide, to refuse to be seen.

The author’s brilliant account of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting relationship challenges myths, finds new meanings in their music, and even throws up a few surprises

It is a strange and beguiling experience to find music you have had in your head since childhood reveal new and unsuspected shades of meaning 50 years later. Beatles songs aren’t like most pop songs; instead of fading, they take on a richer colour and nuance, not least because new generations of fans inquire more deeply into what previous listeners might have overlooked or simply misunderstood. One twist of the kaleidoscope and a song we thought we knew suddenly sounds even better than it did the first 100 times we heard it.

This is the effect of reading Ian Leslie’s brilliant study of the Beatles’ music, a book that offers not only a lesson in listening (again) but an enthralling narrative of friendship, creative genius and loss. At its centre is the songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the unprecedented peaks the two of them scaled in remaking English popular music. You may find it impossible not to be awed by their achievement all over again. But Leslie also wants to challenge a myth about the pair. After the Beatles finally disbanded, a consensus formed that Paul was the straight man to John’s rebel bohemian – vanilla against brimstone – which hardened into holy writ on Lennon’s murder in 1980. McCartney’s inadequate off-the-cuff response to the news (“it’s a drag”) took some living down. Leslie lays to rest this old opposition, arguing that there was “no John without Paul, and vice versa”. Their collaboration was as tight and co-dependent as two climbers roped together on a mountain face.

The actor talks bird-watching, homework trauma and the hands-on skill she’s teaching herself

Lie-in or early start? I’m a horrible sleeper – I spend very little time in the bedroom – and I’ll read until the rest of the world wakes up. On an ideal Sunday morning I’d go for a walk with binoculars. I like bird-watching.

Favourite bird? The house sparrow. They’re in decline, so they’re more interesting than they would seem, and they’re full of character.

Victor Hugo seduces, big names tackles a world in permacrisis and Hélène Binet challenges the Englishness of the country house – all in your weekly dispatch

Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo
These gothic fantasies and nature studies by the author of Les Misérables transport you to a surreal, seductive inner world. Read the full review .
• Royal Academy, London, until 29 June