Art / Exhibitions

Among them was his house at Lincoln's Inn Fields, where he not only lived and worked, but assembled an incredible collection of antiquities.
The house and its collection were bequeathed to the public in 1833 as Sir John Soane's Museum. On the first Tuesday evening of every month the curators illuminate the collection by candlelight.

This exhibition of more than 30 of Barbara Hepworth's Hospital Drawings is the first time that so many of these powerful pieces have been shown together. She drew them between 1947 and 1949, during the birth of the NHS, having been allowed into several operating theatres as an observer.

Syrian revolutionaries are using every weapon at their disposal to resist the regime of Bashar al-Assad - including cartoons. In the comic strip reproduced above, Bashar al-Assad tickles the sleeping dragon of sectarianism, only for it to swallow him whole. In this case, a picture paints a complex political situation.

As the regime has heavily censored the press for years, Syrian artists have a long tradition of using metaphorical imagery to convey dissent. Now, as the armed struggle intensifies, that creative artistry has been unleashed.

If you know something of Cecil Beaton's politics you could be forgiven for thinking that this exhibition may be one to miss. Beaton, like so many of the English aristocracy that he longed to be part of, was an anti-Semite a fawning monarchist and a snob of the worst sort.

However, if you can afford the eight quid to get in, missing this exhibition would be an error for a number of reasons.

Victorian Britain, we know now, was one of capitalism's great success stories. Britain industrialised and came to dominate the world economically and politically. At the time success seemed far less certain to Britain's rulers. Revolution broke out in France in 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871: it might do so in Britain. The educated classes had believed that the Bible, central to their ideas, was literally true: in 1859 Darwin's Origin of Species implied that it was not. Britain was the world's first industrial superpower, but could such a society last?

Heartfield pioneered photomontage and used the technique of cutting up and combining photographic images to strong political effect. His most famous works were powerful satirical attacks on Hitler and the Nazis.

Heartfield was born Helmut Herzfelde. He anglicised his name during the First World War in protest against German nationalism.

So this exhibition at the British Musuem seems timely. Visitors are invited to walk through a series of themed rooms which explore the relationship between the plays and the world that Shakespeare would have known. Specially commissioned videos of well-known actors performing Shakespearean soliloquies are interspersed among the swords, maps, paintings, bear skulls, witches' charms and other renaissance relics.

Although at £14 it's a bit expensive for those without British Museum membership, there is plenty to enjoy here.

Edward Burtynsky says that the main aim of his work is to depict nature transformed through industry. Over a long career he has photographed mines, quarries, scrapyards, shipyards, recycling yards, refineries, oil fields and oil spills, factories and urban landscapes.

Through these images he attempts to show us places that are outside most people's normal experience, but whose output is central to our daily lives. These landscapes are often scarred and damaged by industrial development - but Burtynsky's photographs are often hauntingly beautiful.

The 1990 film adaptation of Philip K Dick's short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale", starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as forgetful fugitive Douglas Quaid, was a huge hit.

This reboot of Total Recall stars Colin Farrell and will try to put some of the political punch back into Dick's sci-fi romp.

So Wordsworth's beloved Lake District is punctured by Blake's dark satanic mills; for George Eliot's provincial characters the railways are a thrilling but threatening herald of progress; from a train carriage in Edward Thomas's well-known poem "Adlestrop", the serenity of an English village seems complete - but the horror of an industrial world war is just round the corner.