Next week Milan-based Stefano Mezzaroma’s first UK exhibition opens at The Italian Cultural Institute in London. No Jokes Please: We’re Italian features works lampooning well-known multinational brands, and will be popular with fans of contemporary pop art.

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Cézanne sale breaks world record

A painting by Paul Cézanne of two peasants playing cards has sold for a record price of £158.4 million.

Roderic Fenwick Owen: Writer and adventurer who became court poet to a Sheikh

The death of Roderic Fenwick Owen a month before his 90th birthday marks the belated breaking of many moulds. Descended from an old Lincolnshire family and heir to a handsome fortune, Fenwick Owen spent the late 1940s crewing his way around the world on tramp steamers; these typically belonged to shipping lines owned by the families of schoolfriends from Summer Fields or Eton. The young Englishman jumped ship from the SS Wairuna on a remote Tahitian island, intent on a year of beachcombing. Instead, he was seduced by, and married, a Polynesian princess called Turia, only to desert her a year later and sail on. The story of his youth reads like a novel by Somerset Maugham. Containerisation and mass tourism would make it impossible today.

Album: Earle Brown, Synergy (Hat [now] Art)

Brown, though never as celebrated as his pals Cage and Feldman, produced some of the more enjoyably questing systems music of the last century.

The Hand That First Held Mine, By Maggie O'Farrell

Since her early novels After You'd Gone and My Lover's Lover, Maggie O'Farrell's fiction has been touched by the otherwordly. In this new book - winner of the 2010 Costa Novel Award - she exchanges the more febrile expressions of romantic love for a haunting tale of the baby blues.

Kapitoil, By Teddy Wayne

Reality bytes for a city slicker

Biopic to tell the outrageous story of Peggy Guggenheim

A film featuring racy sex scenes, the sinking of the Titanic and portrayals of Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and James Joyce might be dismissed as too far-fetched by Hollywood standards.

The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws, By Margaret Drabble Atlantic

It was to ward away "ill thoughts" while her husband had cancer that Margaret Drabble took to doing jigsaws. A self-confessed untidy writer, Drabble finds succour in them, and the escape they offer from the messiness and ragged edges of human life, where broken ties cannot easily be mended, and missing pieces refuse to be filled.

Urban gardener, Cleve West: Chuck out the yucca

Urban gardening can be frustrating around this time of year when gardening magazines up the ante for late summer colour. Drifts of heleniums, echinacea and asters to extend the season are just fine but many of us simply don't have the room. Containers are often the answer and even a wide shallow pot of montbretia is enough to lift the spirits. I had intended to beat the slugs by buying in a selection of dahlias to offset the feeling of summer deprivation, but things didn't go to plan and our garden this season has had to endure a certain amount of neglect ("What's new?" I can hear it growling in the background), because of holidays, an obscure viral infection (a parting gift from Nepal) and then several more weeks trying to catch up at the design studio, not to mention the allotment.

Open Eye: Colourful start for new course

Jackson Pollock's colourful canvases made an appropriate backdrop to celebrate the launch of the OU's new Art and its Histories course at the Tate Galley.

Monday Book: Intelligentsia and the CIA

WHO PAID THE PIPER? THE CIA AND THE CULTURAL COLD WAR BY FRANCES STONOR SAUNDERS, GRANTA, pounds 20

Cricket World Cup: Pakistan clubbed by Klusener

South Africa win enthralling battle of the Super Two thanks to their record-breaking run machine; Pakistan 220-7 (50 overs) South Africa 221-7 (49 overs) Moin Khan 63, S Elworthy 2-33 J H Kallis 54 South Africa won by 3 wickets

Art of persuasion

Matthew Collings has put down his brush to present a new TV series in which he shares his love for modern art

Books: Skewed perspectives from a Californian dreamer

When a great British art critic crossed the Atlantic, did he lose his vision on the voyage? James Hall surveys the wreckage of a Titanic folly: Farewell to an Idea: episodes from a history of modernism by T J Clark Yale University Press, pounds 30, 451pp
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