Anna Aslanyan

In May 2025, ten people affiliated with Eksmo, Russia’s publishing behemoth, were detained in Moscow. Three of them, Pavel Ivanov, Dmitry Protopopov and Artyom Vakhlyaev, were charged with ‘organising activities of an extremist organisation’. Their crime was distributing LGBT-themed books (such as Pioneer Summer, a bestselling novel in which two teenagers exchange a few tentative kisses). Placed under house arrest, the accused faced up to twelve years in prison. Their hearings concluded this month; all three were given suspended four-year prison sentences.

In Nayatt School, Spalding Gray played a ‘pedantic schoolteacher’ and the psychiatrist from The Cocktail Party, using a recording of its 1949 production. ‘It was also about my mother,’ Gray wrote, ‘and the victimisation of women in male-dominated social structures. It worked on many levels for us all.’ The play has now been remounted by The Wooster Group. Nayatt School Redux, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, is on in London this week.

‘Let the Minion skate!’ people were urging on social media days before the start of the Winter Olympics. Universal Pictures had refused Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté permission to perform his Minions-inspired figure-skating programme in Milan. Eventually ‘the internet did its thing’ and he was allowed to go ahead with his performance.

On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library’s St Pancras building. ‘We’ve got a library with no books, no readers, no digital content, no front-facing staff and absolutely no clue!’

John Heartfield was forced to leave Germany in 1933. Even before the Nazis put him on their hit list, his art had caused controversy. In 1928 he designed the cover for a book about the mores of the German top brass (Erotik und Spionage in der Etappe Gent by Heinrich Wandt). When it was banned, Heartfield produced another, turning the censor’s scissors against the censor.