I can’t remember when there was last such an abundance of wonderful exhibitions in London. But if I could frogmarch our current cabinet to only one show, it would be to Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965 at the Barbican. Bordered by barbed wire and suffused with atomic dread, it speaks volumes both about the darkness of conflict, and the particular quality of the light that rises after the bombs cease falling. Most strikingly of all, a sizable amount of the work was made by immigrants to these islands. Of 48 artists, I counted 11 who were born elsewhere.
Some are well known: the painter Frank Auerbach, who arrived in Britain thanks to the Kindertransport; the potter Hans Coper, who fled Germany in 1939, only to be interned here as an enemy alien. But there are other, less familiar names, too: Magda Cordell, a Hungarian refugee whose Figure 59 (1958) recalls a body torn by shrapnel; Eva Frankfurther, another escapee from Nazi Germany, whose tender double portrait, West Indian Waitresses (1955), adorns an exhibition poster; Gustav Metzger, the son of Polish Jews who arrived here as a boy, and whose swirling installation, Liquid Crystal Environment (1965), is a highlight of the show.
It is, I know, almost impossible to imagine Priti Patel and co wandering a gallery of a weekend. But we live in hope. Someone (not Nadine Dorries) should organise an outing. How good it would be to find the odd oil or sculpture on political social media accounts; to have the Conservative frontbench see that by opening doors, rather than closing them, we always gain vastly more than we lose.
Carnality on campus
Having grown up on David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury, it’s good to discover that the campus novel is not, after all, dead and dusted. Vladimir (no, not that Vladimir), by the American playwright Julia May Jonas, casts a savagely fresh eye on badly behaved academics, its author having chosen as her narrator a woman who’s not only married to a literature professor who stands accused of #MeToo crimes, but who’s also in the grip of a scandalous drive of her own.
Vladimir is her younger colleague – all three characters teach in the same department – and she is sexually obsessed with him, to the point of wanting to tie him up.
If this doesn’t sound thrilling enough for you – in which case, I must ask: does a heart really beat inside your ribcage? – let me add that this unnamed middle-aged woman has, in the course of this brilliantly written new book, a series of deeply satisfying run-ins with her ridiculously frail-minded woke students. An extraordinary debut, this critic writes, about to press it on everyone she knows.
Yes Minster
By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way back home from York, where I will have spent a longish weekend queuing for Bettys and mooching round secondhand bookshops. Time spent in York involves several traditions for me, one of which is always to walk its walls. When I did this as a child, I was forever on the lookout for the chessboard my dad convinced us had been carved into the wall’s flags by some bored Roman soldiers (not quite true, I fear).
But these days my mind is usually on bigger (if equally elusive) matters: yes, property. Which house, I ask myself, would be mine in another life? This one, with the red front door and a magnolia tree in the garden? Or that one, with its magnificent gable and superbly easy access to the pub?
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
