Intriguing advances hold out the possibility – but first we have to agree on what ‘life’ means

“Creation of Life”, read the headline of the Boston Herald in 1899. “Lower Animals Produced by Chemical Means.” The report described the work of the German-American marine biologist Jacques Loeb, who later wrote: “The idea is now hovering before me that man himself can act as a creator, even in living nature.”

In fact, Loeb had merely made an unfertilised sea urchin egg divide by exposing it to a mixture of salts – he was not even close to creating life in the lab. No scientist has ever done that. But that ancient dream hovers today over the discipline called synthetic biology, the very name of which seems to promise the creation of artificial life forms. Take one of the most dramatic results in this field: in 2010, scientists at the J Craig Venter Institutes in Maryland and California announced they had made “the first self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell ”.

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From Samuel Pepys to Joan Didion, many literary greats wrote for no one but themselves – then found posterity pawing through their secrets. Trust me: you don’t want to know my innermost thoughts

A few years ago, a friend asked me to be her “literary executor”. We were both, I think, tickled by the grandiose sound of it, as if I would be playing off competing bids from the Bodleian and the New York Public Library for her juvenilia and early drafts (she is not actually primarily a writer). What she wants, though, is quite serious: I am to destroy her diaries when she dies.

That is because they aren’t meant for anyone’s eyes but her own. Whatever is in there (I don’t know, didn’t ask), it was never meant for public consumption. Many diarists feel that way: Sheila Hancock wrote about destroying decades’ worth of hers: “Maybe this vicious, verging-on-insane woman is the real me, but if it is I don’t want my daughters to find out.”

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

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O2 Academy Brixton, London
With lengthy Wayne Coyne anecdotes and frequent interruptions for stage effects to be brought on and off, there was an awful lot of time during the Lips’s two-and-three-quarter hours show when nothing was happening

‘You could have had a wee and got back,” the chap behind me says to his partner as Wayne Coyne comes to the close of another rambling between-song anecdote in an oddly frustrating, stop-start evening: over the course of two-and-three-quarter hours, there’s an awful lot of time when nothing is happening – the gap between She Don’t Use Jelly and Flowers of Neptune 6 stretches to seven minutes, what with watching balloons, and Coyne’s anecdote about Kacey Musgraves dropping acid.

The frustrations start before the band take to the stage. Plainly it is better that Brixton Academy is safe for visitors now, but there must surely be a middle ground where those arriving half an hour before show time don’t have to queue for 50 minutes to enter. When the Flaming Lips take to the stage, 15 minutes late, there are still many hundreds outside, and big gaps in the crowd.

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Royal Festival Hall, London
Gardner’s pacing was virtuosic as his cast of hundreds proved the Southbank Centre’s maxim that you cannot experience the Multitudes festival at home

Gustav Mahler objected to his Eighth Symphony being promoted as “The Symphony of a Thousand”, just as he worried about its 1910 premiere being made into a “Barnum and Bailey show”. But the symphony remains a vast undertaking, calling for hundreds of musicians, so the nickname has stuck. Meanwhile, crossing a symphony with a circus act sounds exactly like a night at the Southbank Centre’s self-consciously boundary-crossing Multitudes festival . As it happens, the circus has already been and gone , but this Mahler 8 came with accompanying video by Tal Rosner in a performance directed by Tom Morris . The basic point, the programme explains, is that “you can’t experience Multitudes at home”.

Mahler had already seen to that, of course. No recording (and no domestic sound system) could match the visceral thrill of the combined London Philharmonic Choir , London Symphony Chorus and Tiffin Boys’ Choir launching into the fortissimo opening from three sides of the stage. Or the London Philharmonic Orchestra laying down a contrapuntal theme in monumental slabs. Or two sets of timpani and offstage brass in balconies serving volleys in blistering stereo. Or the sudden spare harshness of the opening of Part 2 as conductor Edward Gardner held back his enormous forces, making space for sinewy woodwind and mere flashes of intensity through another achingly slow buildup, climactic phrases placed with absolute precision, his pacing virtuosic. Woven through this intricate texture and singing mostly from behind the orchestra, the eight solo voices inevitably made the greatest impact at quieter moments, their words often lost in the melee.

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Actor who played Dennis Tanner in Coronation Street but gave up his lucrative role for £20 a week in repertory theatre

As Dennis Tanner in the original cast of Coronation Street, the actor Philip Lowrie, who has died aged 88, portrayed a character newly released from borstal and seeking to make something of his life – while living in the shadow of his past. “In those streets, there is always a bad ’un, a wrong ’un – and he was the wrong ’un,” said the TV soap’s creator, Tony Warren , of Dennis.

Lowrie was introduced to the serial in episode one, broadcast live on 9 December 1960, alongside Pat Phoenix as his mother, the tempestuous Elsie, who accused him of stealing two shillings (10p) from her purse. “You stooped to goin’ in a lady’s handbag,” she says. “Just listen to it,” he responds. “A lady. Is that what you crack on you are these days?”

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The Send Nudes author, one of Granta’s pick of the best young British novelists, on young motherhood, feminism and why we need to break the rules around love

Saba Sams was in bed breastfeeding her two-month-old baby Sonny when she received an email saying that the publisher Bloomsbury wanted to offer her a book deal on the basis of some of her short stories. She was just 22 at the time. “I didn’t even think it was a book,” she says when we meet. “I was just learning how to write.”

Send Nudes , her first collection, about being a young woman in a messed-up world, was published in 2022. She won the BBC national short story award and the Edge Hill short story prize. The following year, she made the once-in-a-decade Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. “Then I was like: ‘Oh, this is actually happening. This feels like a big deal,’” she says.

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Monument Eternal at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum showcases the life, music and writing of the groundbreaking artist also known as Turiya

Om …

Om …

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Once upon a time revealing a magician’s secrets could get you blacklisted, now anyone can learn an illusion or two

Magicians have been around since 2700BC when the father of the art, Dedi, shocked an audience in Egypt with his ball and cup routine. Now, with the advent of talent TV shows and social media where those who dabble in the art of magic have amassed millions of followers, their popularity has reached new heights.

With this has come the rise of tutorial videos showing anybody at home how to pull off their own routines. It was not always this way. For one thing, revealing the secrets behind the world of magic would get you blacklisted.

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A new documentary delves into controversial German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl’s private archive to uncover a director who spent a lifetime covering up her central role in the Nazi propaganda machine

Leni Riefenstahl had several successes at the Venice film festival. In 1932, the festival’s inaugural year, the German film-maker’s mystical mountain drama The Blue Light made the official selection. In 1934, she picked up a gold medal for Triumph of the Will, her chronicle of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg. In 1938, 10 weeks before Kristallnacht, she won best foreign film with Olympia, a two-part documentary of the summer Olympics in Berlin that was commissioned and financed by the Nazi government , overseen by the Reich ministry of propaganda and enlightenment, and released on Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

After the war, and until the day she died, aged 101, in 2003, Riefenstahl insisted that her films were only ever about award-winning art. Through the postwar decades, and over the course of four denazification proceedings, the film-maker presented herself as an apolitical aesthete. She had no interest in “real-world issues”. She was motivated only by beauty, creative opportunity and the perfection of her craft. Although she never disavowed her personal fascination with Hitler, she vehemently denied complicity with the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Olympia and Triumph of the Will were in no way tendentious, she told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1965. They were “history – pure history”.

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