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.”

When a Netflix drama highlights how online influencers can turn a teenager into a killer, it’s time to rethink social media

Every so often, a television drama comes along that has the power to change things. Last year, it was ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office , in which the plight of subpostmasters was rendered with such success that it actually hastened in real-world legislation to compensate them.

And now we have Netflix’s Adolescence , which looks at the online radicalisation of young boys by men’s rights activists (MRAs) such as Andrew Tate. Last week, Keir Starmer told the Commons he had been watching the series with his family and that it portrayed an “emerging and growing problem” that needed to be tackled . Now MPs are examining ideas to address the issue with greater urgency.

Campaigners face online attacks, claims of criminality and complaints to employers. The Church says it’s the victim

Alex Barnes-Ross, a marketing director from east London, regularly posts YouTube videos criticising Scientology. In some of them, the former Scientologist, 29, describes his experience of joining aged 15 and becoming its London director of book sales. In others, he talks about his mental health struggles after signing a “billion-year” contract devoting himself to the organisation – only to be kicked out a few years later, labelled a “potential trouble source”.

Other videos scrutinise its finances and ask questions about alleged mistreatment at Narconon UK , a Scientology-linked rehab facility investigated by the Observer last year.

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.

Rastafarians who sought a spiritual homeland in Shashamene face eviction and arrest for flying flag of Haile Selassie’s empire

In 1999, Ras Paul, a west London DJ born to Jamaican parents, sold part of his voluminous vinyl collection to buy a plot of land and build a house in Shashamene, 125 miles south of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.

Seven years earlier, he had become a Rastafarian, around the time of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, whom the religion reveres as the Messiah. “As an Ethiopian descendent, I wanted to come home,” he says. “It’s the place I felt I belong.”

TikTok, Instagram and YouTube have transformed the hospitality industry. We talk to the restaurants riding the wave of viral-video success

Will Murray isn’t sure about the toad in the hole. In the soft gleam of a prep kitchen, deep below St James’s in London, the chef-patron and co-founder of Fallow frowns at a pan of puffy bronzed batter and extruded sausages. “Do you think we need to do it again?” asks one of his chefs, Emma Taiwo, approaching the pass. “I think we need to do it again,” says Murray, striking an apologetic tone amid the waft of simmering gravy.

On the face of it, this level of perfectionism is not surprising – Murray and his fellow chef and co-founder Jack Croft both emerged from the fastidious, Michelin-starred environment of Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner. What is unexpected is that the people this dish is being made for will never actually taste it. Next to the worktop where Murray and Croft stand, a three-person production crew fiddles with iPhones, audio equipment and propped-up wearable cameras.

Historian Dr Tiffany Jenkins is one of the lineup of new appointees that has raised cultural and historical hackles

The latest appointments to the British Museum’s trustees include an academic expert opposed to the ­restitution of stolen antiquities.

Dr Tiffany Jenkins, author of Keeping Their Marbles , will join new trustees including TV broadcaster and writer Claudia Winkleman, Lord Finkelstein, a Conservative peer who was an adviser to prime minister John Major, the historian and podcaster Tom Holland and the former BBC radio news anchor Martha Kearney for a four-year term. The chair of trustees is George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer.