From Van Gogh’s starry skies to the nocturnal workings of Louise Bourgeois and Patricia Highsmith, sleepless nights have long inspired heightened creativity. Could those artistic impulses actually help us to sleep?

I can’t remember when I first stopped sleeping soundly. Maybe as a child, in the bedroom I initially shared with my brother, Tariq. I would wait for his breathing to quieten, then strain to listen beyond our room in the hope of being the last one awake, and feel myself expanding into the liberating space and solitude. By my early 20s, that childhood game of holding on to wakefulness while others slept began playing out against my will. Sound seemed to be the trigger. It was as if the silence I had tuned into as a child was now a requirement for sleep. Any sound was noise: the burr of the TV from next door, the ticking of a clock in another room. When one layer of sound reduced its volume, another rose from beneath it, each intrusive and underscored by my own unending thoughts. Noise blaring from without and within, until I felt too tired to sleep.

The artist Louise Bourgeois suffered a bad bout of insomnia in the 1990s, during which she created a series of drawings. Among them is an image that features musical notes in red ink, zigzagging across a sheet of paper. They look like the jagged score of an ECG graph that has recorded an alarmingly arrhythmic heartbeat. It sums up the torment of my insomnia: there is a raised heartbeat in every sound.

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Saucy Books in London has become the go-to destination for romance readers – but fans say misogyny is stopping the genre getting the recognition it deserves

Whether you want a brooding billionaire, a queer awakening, a dragon rider (yes, really) or an old-fashioned enemies-to-lovers tale, there’s a romance novel for everybody at Saucy Books.

England’s first romance-only bookshop opened last week in Notting Hill, west London, instantly becoming a go-to destination for readers and turning into a meeting spot for like-minded folk to share their love stories.

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Move over Julia Davies and Sharon Horgan – this devastating, ruthless sitcom is basically the British psyche on a screen. It’s just the medicine

I love watching real-life siblings on-screen. They bring a knotted history to every interaction, the way they look at one another, or don’t. They may love each other; they’re definitely stuck with each other. Daisy May and Charlie Cooper were the last to bottle such contradiction; I’m delighted we now have Such Brave Girls (BBC One, Wednesday 2 July, 11.40pm), returning for a second series, in which creator Kat Sadler stars alongside her sister Lizzie Davidson. Cattier than Longleat, it features some of the most savage writing on TV, and makes me yowl with pleasure.

It’s about traumatised women making terrible choices. Bear with. The ever-excellent Louise Brealey plays Deb, whose husband abandoned his family 10 years ago after popping to the shop for teabags. In financial trouble, she spends her time trying to lock down relations with drippy, slippery widower Dev, played by Paul Bazely, explicitly for his big house. Single-mindedness has made her grim, grasping and less maternal than a stressed hamster. Bad news for daughters Josie and Billie, who give off the stench of joint captivity, and have split into twin coping strategies: one depressed and passive, the other overconfident, bullish and equally lost.

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The vampire slayer’s tenacity and independence freed me from the judgment and violence of my conservative relatives – and now my mum appreciates me for who I am

I was 10, cross-legged on the floor of my parents’ living room in Newcastle, bathed in the blue light of a TV. The volume was set to near-silence – my dad, asleep in another room, had schizophrenia and frontal lobe syndrome, and I didn’t want to wake him. Then, like some divine interruption to the endless blur of news and repeats, I stumbled across Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show may have been barely audible, but it hit me like a lightning bolt.

Before Buffy, life was like a pressure cooker. I secretly yearned for a more alternative lifestyle, but even wearing jeans would have been a big deal in my family. I had an assisted place at a private school as my parents were quite poor. Mum would say: “If you don’t study, we’ll have to put you in the other school, and you’ll just get beaten up.” It sounds like fear-mongering, but she was right: the students in the local school were known to beat Pakistani people up every Shrove Tuesday. So I dedicated my life to working hard.

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Music executives have condemned Irish rappers and Keir Starmer says appearance is not ‘appropriate’, but 100 musicians have signed letter in support

Kneecap will be taking to the Glastonbury stage on Saturday afternoon in front of a packed crowd eagerly anticipating what could be one of the most controversial sets in the festival’s history.

The Irish rap group are performing at 4pm on the West Holts stage, amid criticism from music industry executives and from the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, who said it was not “appropriate” for the band to perform.

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From the revamped Shangri-La area to Floating Points’ mycelium sound system, and weekend-igniting sets from Busta Rhymes, Lola Young and more – see the best of Glastonbury’s opening days

Each year there are tweaks and adjustments to the tried and tested Glastonbury formula, and this year the eccentric Shangri-La area has had a makeover. On Thursday afternoon David Levene took a stroll around the revamped area – see more pictures here in our gallery .

The thoroughfare through the revamped Shangri-La. Photograph: David Levene

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You can also catch Neil Young, Gary Numan, Raye and mystery band ‘Patchwork’. Plus: Uma Thurman’s thriller Suspicion continues. Here’s what to watch this evening

10.30pm, BBC One

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Brad Pitt goes racing in the Top Gun: Maverick director’s latest, while Rachel Zegler makes her West End debut as Eva Perón

M3gan 2.0
Out now
Hitting the sweet spot between camp value and genuine entertainment that’s often surprisingly hard to manage in horror, the first M3ganGAN film saw a sassy artificially intelligent doll slay in both senses of the word. Now she’s back for a sequel, facing off against Amelia, a new doll created by the military, who have clearly not learned the lessons of the first film.

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Forever young Brad Pitt breaks all the motor racing rules, while the final series of the dystopian Korean thriller welcomes a mysterious new contestant. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

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