The Library for the Performing Arts Celebrates Its 60th Anniversary with a Special Tony Honor and a Week of Programming at Lincoln Center - The New York Public Library

The children’s laureates for Ireland and Wales are donating royalties from their works to Sally Rooney in a show of solidarity after she was forced to stop selling books in the UK because of her support for Palestine Action. Chris Haughton, Ireland’s children’s literature laureate, said he also wanted to demonstrate the “absurdity” of the bestselling author being unable to receive royalties from her own UK sales because of her public support for the direct action group. Haughton, whose books have sold millions worldwide, said: “I really want to express my full support for Sally Rooney. As someone who is in the UK a lot of the time, I can’t do what she has done, but I can support her instead of supporting Palestine Action. Chris Haughton. Photograph: Kirstine Bowen“As authors, we need to be focused on freedom of expression, this is everything we’re about, and this is just showing solidarity with an author who has bravely spoken out. “The entire situation is just a farce.

It has become quite the fashion for contemporary writers to have a go at reinventing past classics. We’ve seen it done with imperishable literary heroes like Bond, Jeeves, Poirot and Winnie-the-Pooh. This is a relatively new phenomenon. But not in the case of Sherlock Holmes, where the practice is almost as old as the man himself. Sherlock Holmes was the conception of Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish doctor down on his luck who had turned his hand to fiction to make up for a worrying lack of success in attracting patients to his surgery. Conan Doyle could never have guessed that the first Sherlock Holmes story he wrote, A Study in Scarlet, published in the 1887 issue of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, would in a few years propel him and the characters he created to literary fame. The personalities and characteristics of Holmes and Watson became as familiar to late Victorians as their own friends and families. The readership was worldwide and spread across all ages and classes.

The soprano Martina Arroyo, who has died aged 90, was one of the generation of black American opera singers – others were Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, Shirley Verrett and Grace Bumbry – who in their early careers faced institutionalised racial prejudice before achieving international recognition. Having proved herself to be one of the finest exponents of the leading Verdi roles, Arroyo was finally able to establish herself in the US, as well as worldwide, and went on to become, after her retirement from the stage, a distinguished teacher and ambassador for the art form. Although her vocal talent had been noticed at an early age, she was advised, in view of the paucity of opportunities for black singers, to develop a back-up career – she was engaged for a year as a high-school classroom teacher and for two further years as a social worker – before achieving a measure of recognition from two events in 1958, when she was 22.

Sitting in the restaurant of a Denver hotel, in the middle of a US tour with his band Bleachers, Jack Antonoff shrugs. “There’s this intense need to figure me out,” he frowns, “and I don’t really know where it comes from, because I keep explaining all of it.”He has a point. For the last 12 years, Bleachers have released a succession of albums packed with Antonoff’s strikingly personal and frank songs. Being strikingly personal and frank was the whole point. Antonoff had previously been guitarist in Fun, a pop-rock band who went supernova with their 2011 single We Are Young. Despite co-writing a song that sold 10m copies in the US alone, Antonoff says he “hated” the experience “because I wasn’t the leader, they weren’t my words, and I needed to write a song that if I fucking died tomorrow would be my life story”. He says he insisted his then-record label release said song I Wanna Get Better as Bleachers’ debut single “to let people know what they were in for”. It depicted Antonoff literally screaming in anguish, “losing my mind” with grief in the wake of his younger sister’s death, aged 13, from a brain tumour.

My mother would sing and dance and cook and clean in the kitchen, as many 80s moms did, to divas like Madonna and Paula Abdul. Material Girl made me think: “This is who I want to be.”The first single I bought I bought three records at the same time – Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette, a Sheryl Crow single and Waterfalls by TLC – from Sam the Record Man in Sarnia, Ontario, with money I’d saved up from doing chores around the house. My uncle was always trying to influence me with Canadian music, and he wasn’t wrong for doing so. The song I do at karaoke

His work in the Venice Biennale and at Paula Cooper Gallery turns history’s absences into artworks.