Arts Reviews

Imagine living in a country where the average age is under 16 (in the UK it’s currently 40 and increasing) so that everywhere you go you’re surrounded by teenagers. It sounds exhilarating. Such optimism and energy; the sheer vitality of young blood coursing through the streets. How brilliant, too, for a country to be unfettered by how things have always been done, no elders to restrain them, hold them back, warn against change. But nothing is that simple. For The Compass: A Young World (Wednesday) on the World Service (produced by Mike Gallagher), Alan Kasujja took us to his native Uganda to find out what it’s like to walk down

Emma Watson isn’t, you might say, to everyone’s taste, given that her feminism – she can hardly get up in the morning, it seems, given the burden of expectations on her as a woman – is combined with the possession of a very large, Harry Potter-related fortune. My own reservations about her have more to do with her limited range as an actress – the Dorothy Parker gag about running the whole gamut from A to B comes to mind, though W for wooden might be more like it. But she had a point, she really did, in her acceptance speech for MTV’s acting award for her role as Belle

It was 50 years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. The result was a popular masterpiece. Thirty years later, a less accomplished, tone-deaf group of individuals collaborated on the Millennium Dome, and the result was an expensive, sniggerable calamity. For a while, I was one of them. Of course, it was not really a ‘Dome’ at all, since a dome is a sophisticated self-supporting masonry structure and this was just a big, stupid, hemispherical fabric tent. But ‘Millennium Tent’ did not have rhetorical resonance sufficient to burnish the already very bright and shiny egos of its perpetrators during the Blair Dawn. In any organisation, lots of stuff

Much has been said about the endless photographic mediocrity of the digital age. The infinite glossy ads, the stream of cheap tourist snaps and sea of selfies. You’d forgive a young photographer for feeling disillusioned. In a world where 2 billion images are uploaded to the internet every day, how can you ever be original? What power is there even left in photography? Spread over the east and west wings of Somerset House, the Sony World Photo Awards (open until 7 May) answers these questions at full tilt. The pictures in this mammoth exhibition were selected from over 220,000 online entries from 183 countries  – amateur and professional. As an

These days, Aubrey Powell is a genial 70-year-old who can be found most mornings having breakfast at his local Knightsbridge café. But in the late 1970s, he did something that surely no other human being has done before or since. He photographed a sheep lying on a psychiatrist’s couch on a beach in Hawaii. Its coat had been treated with Vidal Sassoon products, and it was sedated with Valium because it was scared of waves. So what on earth was he up to? The answer — as anybody who recognises Powell’s name will guess — was creating one of the 373 album covers that his company Hipgnosis designed back when