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

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.

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

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.

Reality bytes for a city slicker

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.

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 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.

The Monday Interview: Chief of the General Staff

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.

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

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

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

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