Gems, ghosts and GTA VI: the biggest video games for autumn 2026

The last time she displayed a sculpture in public in Britain, someone covered it in white paint. But, undeterred, the acclaimed artist is a placing a black woman in Trafalgar Square Tschabalala Self is relentlessly positive and unstoppably optimistic. The US artist is waiting for the unveiling of Lady in Blue, her new sculpture for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, a towering, colourful painted bronze of a black woman striding (positively, optimistically) into the future. Self seems resolutely hopeful about the work, which is pretty impressive considering what happened to her last public sculpture in the UK. “Yeah,” she says, speaking from her home in upstate New York. “I mean, that was a completely racist act.” In 2022, Self unveiled Seated at Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross, London. Like Lady in Blue, it was a vast, brightly painted bronze depiction of a black woman, this time seated demurely on a chair. After being shown at Coal Drops Yard without incident, it was moved to the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, where the reception wasn’t quite as warm. “Within the first week,” says Self, “it was spraypainted white, but only on the skin of the sculpture.” As vandalism goes, it doesn’t get much more pointed, or racist. “The first feeling I had was just pain that my sculpture had been harmed. That someone had enacted violence on an object I had imbued with love and affection.”..

Swinton takes a dead man’s identity, Glasgow’s heir to Billy Connolly heads on tour and Gillian Anderson, Keira Knightley and Natalia Osipova all hit the stage • See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here..

The long-running drama reaches Hitler’s rise to power in its final season as its creators reflect on the unsettling parallels between Weimar Germany and the present day It’s the global hit TV series that pulled audiences straight into the chaotic hedonism of 1920s Germany, dramatising the brilliance and brittleness of a newly built democratic system with unprecedented ambition. But in the 13 years that the German makers of Babylon Berlin have worked on the show, modern democracies from the US to Hungary to South Korea have come under pressure in ways the creators say they could never have imagined when they started...